To say Tom Cruise is desperate for a hit is possibly the understatement of the decade. So desperate is he, in fact, that he will drive a reasonably priced car around a track and take questions off one of the smuggest gits on television in order to look like a regular Joe. But sadly for Tom, no amount of humble pie or endless grinning can save his latest cinematic offering Knight & Day.
Knight & Day tells the oft-told tale of a secret agent (Cruise) travelling around the world in pursuit of a device that will save the earth’s natural resources from running out. Somewhere along the way he falls in love with a car mechanic in the shape of Cameron Diaz and the two embark on an insane adventure that would have James Bond himself handing in his ‘00’ membership card.
Somebody really needs to sit Tom Cruise down and tell him that it’s not the 90s anymore. Back then he was cock of the walk and box office gold all wrapped up in a pearly white-toothed, perma-grinning face. Much has changed since then. His audience has grown older to be replaced by one that cares little for his opinion or religious beliefs; all they want is to have a good time without the BS.
Cruise will tell anyone who’s listening, he “performs his own stunts†and that he’s broken his fair share of bones doing so, but that doesn’t cut the mustard when the stunts are all obviously CGI’d into the film to such a degree that you can’t trust what you see on the screen. Case in point, the motorcycle chase in Spain dodging the Luas looks all wrong.
Trying too hard
The same can be said for the casting which has Cruise in the lead of a film made for someone with actual comedy chops (Bruce Willis, in my honest opinion) and Cameron Diaz trying too hard to look young with what looks like a face full of botox and a bubble-headed teenagers savvy.
The baddie is played by-the-numbers by the much-better-than-this Peter Saarsgard – you’ll groan when he is finally revealed as the bad guy. The rest of the cast don’t get a look in as Cruise and Diaz bounce around the screen in an attempt to disguise how bad the film actually is.
As for director James Mangold (Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma), he obviously had no control over the project as Cruise was in his shadow the whole time. As a result, the film plays out like a bunch of action sequences stuck together, but thankfully for the audience it comes in under two hours.
No one in Hollywood who knows him has the nuts to say that they think he’s making a huge mistake
I remember watching Michael Parkinson interview Tom Cruise in 2004 when he asked him “what do you do when people say Scientology is some lunatic fringe sort of religion†to which Cruise responded “they might say that to you but they don’t say that to meâ€.
That statement goes someway to explaining why Knight & Day is the mess that it is. It seems no one in Hollywood who knows him has the nuts to say that they think he’s making a huge mistake starring in a poor copy of a Bond/Bourne movie.
I’m sure on paper this read like a different slant on the Mr and Mrs Smith movie starring Brad and Angie, but that film and that couple had something Knight & Day is sorely missing… chemistry. Everyone knows what happened on the set of the Smiths and that’s why the audience went in their droves, whereas Cruise and Diaz come off as good friends with little or no interest sexually in each other.
Throw that and Cruise’s manic acting style into the bag and you have the cinematic equivalent of him jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch.
If ever there was an actor in need of Tarantino’s magic career-saving direction it is Tom Cruise. While definitely not one for anyone sick of Cruises Schtick, there’s just about enough here for the casual cinema goer.
Andrew Kennedy
