Action-comedy Knight and Day is being seen in the overseas press as a “comeback” vehicle for both its stars, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. Cruise, who is apparently viewed with increasing suspicion by the American public, endured flops with his last two movies, Valkyrie and … oh, I can’t remember the other one. Diaz hasn’t had a hit since, well, whenever. So here they are, paired up in an instance of two-and-two-makes-five star power, in a movie that combines comedy, romance and thriller to pretty entertaining effect.
The script for Knight and Day started as a buddy comedy, with two men (presumably) on the run, in the manner of Midnight Run or, more recently, Pineapple Express. It may well have worked in that form, depending on the stars. But it was probably destined to become a kind of romcom, reverting to type by calling on its ancestry in a long line of movies about odd couples engaging in witty banter while desperately trying to escape malevolent forces.
Cruise is Roy Miller, a superspy or what you might call, in South African, a bloody agent; Diaz is June Havens, a woman whose mode of employment is uncertain but who has a fetish for fixing up old cars. They literally bump into each other at Wichita airport, find themselves on the same flight, and after a spasm of action, a crash landing and the like, are thereafter joined together in their flight from the baddies who want the MacGuffin in Roy’s possession. And let no man put them asunder.
As the updated Hitchockery of the idea indicates, the most notable ancestor of Knight and Day would be The 39 Steps — there’s even a handcuff moment to make the reference clear, though it may be unconscious. After all, The 39 Steps was not the last film to feature its leads cuffed together until they fall in love.
It is, however, a distant ancestor. Between 1935 and 2010 there have been plenty of movies using this basic concept, and many of them have left their traces in the hurlyburly of Knight and Day. Anyway, the elegantly polite kind of chase framework and the somewhat distanced love process of the 1930s wouldn’t draw much of an audience today — no, we need eye-battering action, with massive amounts of shooting, much jumping on and off cars, motorbikes, planes, helicopters and so on and so on. What, no paragliding? No skiing?
That’s the James Bond element purloined and rather efficiently sent up by Knight and Day. Roy Miller is a superagent (with all the preposterously supernatural skills that entails) who has “gone rogue”. Of course it’s really his enemies in the agency who are rogue, and he’s a good guy — a motor-mouthed, cold-blooded killer of a good guy. He is also to be forgiven the fact that he drugs June, not once but several times, in the manner of a date-rapist, though the movie makes a running joke of this. It’s all okay because Roy has June’s best interests at heart and she wakes up safe and sound, usually in an exotic location.
There’s a scene that points up the underlying hypocrisy of such developments. June wakes up on a tropical island, dressed only in a red bikini. Clearly Roy had to have undressed her and put her in that bikini, and she’s rather cross about it. We’re meant to sympathise with her, I think, in her annoyance at this blatant violation of her rights, but of course the real reason this has happened is so that we, the audience, can see Diaz in a skimpy little red thing, and the real exploiters are the filmmakers. Even when she shrugs on a shirt and stomps off into the jungle in a hissy fit, we are given a good gawk at her long, tanned legs. This is a textbook case of how some movies exploit their actors, particularly female actors, while using the narrative as a kind of mea culpa and alibi.
Cruise gets his shirt off, too, and in the same scene, but the reasons here are surely more to do with insisting upon his ageless star power than anything else. As he nears 50, we are supposed to be filled with admiration that he’s still got such a well-shaped torso, and what that torso is trying to signal to us is that, like many an ageing male Hollywood star, he’s got years and years of moviemaking ahead of him, in which he will carry on as though he were still the young buck of Top Gun. Such is the fantasy, at any rate — Cruise’s fantasy, but we are allowed to participate.
Actually, I worry more about his face than his torso. He’s got a hawklike profile, but the eyes seem ever more to be those of a demented rodent. They may even be a little out of kilter, as though they were looking in different directions — one at his “love interest” and the other watching out for assassins. Just as well, really, because there are a lot of assassins in this movie. Not that Roy doesn’t manage to murder them all, either one by one or in batches. There is much machine-gunning here, and deaths aplenty, but like that other recent romcom with massacres, Killers, you see blood only when it’s a tiny little flesh wound. Death as pratfall, I call it.
Up against the Cruise cross-eyes are the alarmingly bright baby-blues of Diaz, often widened in shock or fright, then counterbalanced by that huge fish-mouth grin of hers. She’s charming enough in what can only be seen as the Goldie Hawn role, the ditzy blond with gumption, and that evokes a slew of other movies buried in the DNA of Knight and Day, though it seems Cruise is trying for Cary Grant status rather than that of, say, George Segal or Walter Matthau.
Either way, he hasn’t the human warmth, or can’t project it, let alone the light, ironic humour of Grant, so it’s best to keep it all at the semi-parodic level. And he kills more people in this movie than Grant did in all of his half-century as a movie star. Perhaps it’s most sensible to see Cruise as a kind of American Roger Moore, who will probably keep going until his fake tan fades and the hair dye starts dripping down his cheeks.
But that is speculative, and Knight and Day is enough for now. The script manages to work up a few good one-liners, the pace is enjoyably frenetic, and the action works in a loud, cartoony sort of way. The movie is a tad too long, with at least one getaway sequence too many, but it never bores. It’s ridiculous, and utterly amoral at heart, but, hey, that’s entertainment.