Film File - Knight And Day
If it's August, it's likely time for a Tom Cruise all-action outing. With the 'Mission Impossible' franchise on hold for now, the Cruiser has opted for the nearest thing - a Bond-meets-Bourne vehicle aimed at the summer blockbuster audience. In 'Knight And Day', he plays agent Roy Miller, a super-sleuth who gets entangled with June Havens (Cameron Diaz), a woman caught between him and an organisation who set him up in in a global conspiracy. Light on plot and heavy on action sequences, what follows is a globetrotting adventure that erupts into a maze of double-crosses, close escapes, false identities and romantic moments, as the pair come to realise that all they can count on is each other. Through a series of circumstances, Miller sends the apparently ordinary Havens on a screeching detour after she boards a plane in Wichita and begins chatting up her charming, mysterious seatmate. Bad move if June was after a quiet life. Suddenly, the plane is hurtling into a cornfield without any crew or passengers surviving, and, without time to catch her breath, the seemingly innocent June finds herself being pursued around the globe - dodging bullets in Boston, leaping rooftops in Austria and running from bulls in Seville - all in the company of an unstable yet decidedly alluring secret agent at the centre of a life-or-death adventure that will push these two people from opposite worlds to do the one thing they've long avoided: trust. Director James Mangold has a history of taking creative and edgy approaches to classic genres - including the Oscar-winning biopic of Johnny Cash, 'Walk The Line', as well as a very different angle on the classic Western in his remake of '3:10 To Yuma'. This time around, Mangold makes another departure, mixing global espionage action with witty romance, and wrapping it in an intricate web of high-speed chases, gun battles and escapes inside a love story. Unlike most action films of this sort, 'Knight And Day' did not begin as a comic book, TV series or franchise property, but as an original script by Patrick O'Neill that plays to those classic Hollywood thrillers of another age like 'Charade' and 'North By Northwest' - a modern action picture with a light heart. For audiences willing to put their calculating brains on hold and surrender to the mindless joy and escape of an action romance, 'Knight And Day' ticks all the boxes needed for cinema-going in August. With Cruise now in his 40s - 47, in fact - and looking as fit as ever, it marks a departure from the serious action roles of his past into another thrill scene that might be his new environment over the next decade. Combined with Diaz, an actress who opts to work the scatterbrain persona to the Cruiser's keenly focused outlook, their chemistry matches the overall theme of fun over substance. With trouble following Cruise wherever he goes, Diaz as the fast-learning understudy is a perfect foil to help build the tension and drive the humour. Jumping into fabulous locations straight out of 'No Frontiers' every 10 minutes, the background scenery more than compensates for any plot flatness and keeps the pace nicely purring. Peter Sarsgaard, as the villain Fitzgerald, once again picks up the ruthless persona from 'Ronin' a decade ago and gives Cruise a decent baddie to contend with. 'Knight And Day' won't win any Oscars, for sure, but that's not what it's about anyway. This one is about thrills and spills and a feelgood injection during a midweek night at the flicks.