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DokBrowne [ 8.0 ]
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I agree, this looked lame - fromthe '80s buddy cop TV show title to America's least favorite movie star Tom Cruise in the lead, in what looks like a copy of too many other romantic action comedies (romactioncoms?) - but like "True Lies" and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", it's a cleverly staged parody and celebration of the mold. They're not really doing anything new, but they're doing it all from an amusingly fixed perspective that offers more inventive plotting and keeps things from becoming too predictable, and they're having as much fun as ever in the process. That neither Cruise nor Diaz ever seem to be in real danger is the wrong approach - we never believed for a second that Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie might die in their movie either, yet it was still exciting, fresh, and spirited. The suspense in "Knight and Day" plays with identity more than survival. More importantly though is that this is simply a big fun over-the-top joyride. The stars are as committed as ever to their usual types, and for those who haven't forsaken Tom Cruise altogether, it's pleasing to see his lighthearted, jubilant side again after a gauntlet of intense performances. Leonardo DiCaprio, Ryan Gosling, Daniel Day-Lewis, you listening? Just kidding you're all awesome, don't ever change. Just smile once in a while.
Anyway yeah I know this is packaged like the epitome of cliched summer movies, but in fact it's in the league of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "Ocean's 11", big movies expertly made for nothing more than your breezy entertainment, and it delivers
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Emmitt [ 8.0 ]
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Stars tom cruise and cameron diaz, big buildup but it works. Cruise plays a bad dude and pulls it off, diaz plays the women caught in the middle of his evil plans. unique and so fun to watch .
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Dancing_P [ 3.5 ]
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Globe-trotting spy comedies have long been a box-office staple. They're fun, frothy, attract big stars and are smart enough to attract more serious moviegoers as well as light enough to entice the general public. They are as close to a sure thing as there has been in Hollywood since the halcyon days of Charade. Yet there's something very, very wrong with the crop in the last few years. They're tooled and engineered so minutely as inevitable cash cows that they end up failing at every concieveable goal they set out for themselves. Knight and Day is a particularly egregious example of this movie-by-committee: full of elements that are known to work stitched together with as little heart as possible. Sure, it has all of the exotic locations and double-entendres and action scenes that have made this genre such a safe bet but they're all covered in the unhealthy glow of generic product. All movies are made with profit in mind, but some of them seem to be at least a little fun. Knight and Day is what happens when you work too hard at having fun.
Tom Cruise stars as Roy Miller, spy extraordinaire who is supposedly being framed by a former colleague (Peter Sarsgaard) as having gone rogue, forcing the CIA to tail him and (hopefully) exterminate him. Miller has access to the Zephyr, a battery that's considered the first source of undepletable energy since the sun, and its young inventor (Paul Dano). In his attempts to flee the CIA, he ropes in car mechanic June Havens (Cameron Diaz) and begins the aforementioned globe-trotting spy adventure on motorcycles, tropical island, in a helicopter, etc.
Knight and Day's most obvious flaw is the almost total lack of chemistry between Diaz and Cruise. Both are adequate stars that can (and do) anchor this kind of movie usually, but as a love-and-hate romantic pair they're fucking dreadful. Watching their courtship is like watching Elimidate or Date My Mom with more explosions. Their chemistry (or lack thereof) isn't helped by a stitched-together script that seems to be a collection of setpieces from a random assortment of spy movies from the Austrian train to the South American gunrunner villa. The always-competent James Mangold has never worked with a movie of this stature and although, like anyone, he can't make heads or tails of the rickety structure, he keeps things moving rather well. A good supporting cast is given nothing to work with (Dano's character is particularly ill-defined; is he supposed to be autistic or eccentric? What's with the extensive Hall & Oates references?), making the leads' clunky rapport even more obvious. On paper, everything is there for a moderately good time; what's on screen reeks of market research and script recycling (unsurprisingly, the film was reworked twice by its author to fit radically different genres and then rewritten by no less than EIGHT script doctors).
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.6 |
| No. Ratings | : 3 | |
| No. Reviews | : 3 | |
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