Knight and Day

Recently I went to see Knight and Day, a new action-comedy starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. Typically I like movies which are over-the-top ridiculous. I think I laughed more during X-Men 3 than I have watching most comedies. As a side note, if you've never seen Kelsey Grammar play Beast, it's well worth watching. But Knight and Day was a little too much even for me. The main problem was that the movie never committed to taking itself seriously or to parodying itself, instead it occupied some murky middle ground of "wink-wink, but actually we think this is a pretty good movie." Well, it's not. I might not be the most qualified person to say this, since I fell asleep in the middle, which I'm told, led me to miss Tom Cruise singled-handedly escaping a torture chamber, and leading Cameron Diaz via parachute to his private island in the Azores. I would of been more mad if those scenes were among the most ridiculous parts of the movie, but I honestly don't think they'd rank in the top ten. Earning that honor might be an unexperienced Cameron Diaz somehow driving a car from the backseat, through a crowded Boston tunnel, down the wrong side of the high way flawlessly. Or maybe it's Tom Cruise magically disappearing from a SWAT-team surrounded room. Not fighting his way out, not hiding and slipping out after the police left, but actually going from the surrounded room to running on the roof with no explanation. Or maybe most ridiculously, Cameron Diaz putting herself in the possession of weapon traffickers because "she wants to try to find Tom Cruise."

Look, I know movies like Knight and Day aren't supposed to be analyzed for plot holes. And if the movie was done well, I probably would have been laughing at these moments, instead of feeling like I had been cheated. But I did feel like I had been cheated, which is the whole point. The movie took itself just seriously enough to not be intentionally funny, but not seriously enough to be unintentionally funny. I call it National Treasure 2 syndrome. So to sum up: don't see this movie in theaters, don't pay money rent it, but do hope to see the airplane scene where Tom Cruise takes out the plane full of goons and then makes out with Cameron Diaz before landing the plane in a cornfield, on cable for free. That's really the only scene not worth negative money.

1.5/5 stars