Editorial
Front Page - Friday, July 9, 2010
The Critic's Corner
David Laprad
“Knight & Day” smells like a good idea gone bad. The entire movie feels rushed to meet a summer release date, and reeks of studio tampering. It’s not the worst film in theaters, but that doesn’t make it worth seeing.
It opens well: Tom Cruise stars as Roy Miller, a government agent who’s gone rogue in an attempt to keep a remarkable new technology, called the Zephyr, from falling into the wrong hands. At the airport, he bumps into June Havens, played by Cameron Diaz, twice. When they find out they’re boarding the same plane, they exchange the kind of look that says, “I might be interested.”
Then the airline bumps June from the flight. What neither she nor Roy know is that a bad man named Fitzgerald has stocked the plane with assassins out to kill Roy and retrieve the Zephyr. June manages to convince the airline to let her on anyway.
For the first few minutes of the trip, Roy and June swap nervous smiles and small talk. Eventually, she goes to the bathroom. While she’s in there, Roy kills everyone else. The moments that follow June’s exit from the restroom, during which she realizes she might be on a plane with a psychopath, and that the psychopath is trying to land the plane in a cornfield, are classic.
Roy and June survive the landing, but the movie doesn’t. First, Roy drugs June, then he takes her home, puts her in bed, and leaves. When she wakes up, she sees a television report about the crash and freaks out. Immediately, questions started popping up like weeds in my head.
For example, the reporter on the scene mentions the plane crash, but not all of the bodies inside. That made me go “Uh oh...” Later, I wondered why a two-bit cafe would have four security cameras, and questioned Fitzgerald’s ability to access the footage on a national intraweb. That made me go “Oh no...” Then, as Roy saved June from a dozen bad guys with semi-automatic weapons by returning fire while walking directly toward them, I went, “Oh well.”
“Knight and Day” fell apart too early for me to care about its sudden turn toward the ridiculous, so I settled back and waited for the end.
I occupied myself by taking an inventory of the things that made no sense. A big one comes when June follows Roy, who says he’s “going out” for a few minutes. She hears him trying to sell the Zephyr to a second bad guy, but later, it becomes evident he had no intention of making the sale. I can’t tell you why Roy pretended to want to sell the device, because “Knight and Day” never makes that clear.
Then there are the scenes in which Roy drugs June to help her get through a tense situation. Time and again, he drugs her on one corner of the globe and she wakes up on the other. I figured Roy was calling in favors, or had his own super secret modes of transportation, but those things were never shown, either. He couldn’t have been taking publicly available transportation, right?
I also wondered why the writer, Patrick O’Neill, didn’t take advantage of the opportunities in his script. For instance, early on, Roy tells June everything about who he is, what the Zephyr is, and why Fitzgerald wants it. I thought he was lying to her, but I was wrong. Why O’Neill didn’t keep audiences guessing about Roy is beyond me.
Then there are the blatantly fake computer-generated special effects. Wow. From a car chase, to a motorcycle pursuit, to an airplane that attacks Roy and June on an island, all of the action looks like it was lifted from a cheaply made video game. Nothing moves with any weight, physical presence, or even regard to the other things around it.
I’d mention the horrible dialog dub that made my usually forgiving wife laugh out loud, but I’m running out of space.
By all reports, the original script for “Knight and Day” was brilliant, and there are shades of a better movie here. The chemistry between Cruise and Cameron is quite effective, and there are some truly funny scenes. I also like that Roy arranges for his parents, who think he’s dead, to win lotteries and vacations.
All I can assume is the studio thought “Knight and Day” needed to be more commercial and made changes with marketing in mind. Why else would the movie be called “Knight and Day?” Those aren’t the names of anyone or anything in the film!
At best, “Knight and Day” is a DVD rental. At home, the shoddy special effects won’t matter as much, and the romance that develops between June and Roy, as well as the occasional laugh, will be enough to entertain you.
Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.
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