Movie Summary of Knight and Day by Michael The Moviegoer.
KNIGHT AND DAY = **1/2
“Mission: Implausible”
Imagine Tom Cruise playing his Ethan Hunt character as if he were Leslie Nielsen in “Airplane”. There are moments in “Knight And Day” that are exactly that funny. I’m still trying to determine if the laughs are intended or not. Perhaps the most frightening thing about “Knight And Day” is that there are too many other moments where it feels as if director James Mangold wants us to see this as a real espionage thriller instead of a comedy.
It’s a shame he just didn’t choose one style and stick to it. Mangold’s not known for making comedies. But he has made some noteworthy ‘serious’ films like “Walk The Line”, “Girl, Interrupted” and “Cop Land”. Maybe his intention was to create a hybrid of both genres, hence the otherwise unexplainable title. But if he had gone full-on comedy with this material, we might be talking about another “Tropic Thunder”.
In “Knight And Day” Tom Cruise plays Roy Miller (the same character name Matt Damon has in “Green Zone”, but no relation I’m guessing). Cruise has a chance encounter with the beautiful Cameron Diaz on an ill-fated flight which may contain the only other explanation for the title. The scenes in the cabin show daylight out the windows while the front window in the cockpit is clearly night, although I’m sure that’s just an unfortunate editing error setting the tone for how messy this movie will become.
In a wanna-be Hitchcockian way, Cruise and Diaz suddenly find themselves on the run from government bad guys who are after this film’s MacGuffin, a perpetually self-powering battery called a Zephyr. (Wouldn’t a better title for this film be “Night Of The Zephyr”?)
The chase goes international with locations ranging from New York to Spain to Salzburg, Austria. Although it’s doubtful this cast ever set foot in Austria since it looks like they’re just performing in front of a green-screen for most of the movie. If the filmmakers really did travel to Salzburg, they might have done more with the scenery there, just as Robert Wise did a half-century ago when he shot “The Sound Of Music” there.
There’s an overall feeling that this movie came dangerously close to being Tom Cruise’s first direct-to-video release. It alternates between silly and serious so often that… wait, now I think I understand that title!
DVD Double Feature: To really notice the extreme contrast I’m talking about, go back and look at Tom Cruise’s first attempt at playing Ethan Hunt in Brian DePalma’s excellent first “Mission: Impossible” movie from 1996.
Michael The Moviegoer
