MOVIE REVIEW: KNIGHT AND DAY

Knight and Day is yet another spy thriller, with the same story we have seen countless times before. Tom Cruise plays Roy Miller, one of the country's top spies who is framed for trying to steal a special self charging battery referred to as the zephyr. The F.B.I. attempts to assassinate him on a plane and when he bumps into Cameron Diaz's character, June Havens, they put her on the plane as well to make sure she has nothing to do with the zephyr's whereabouts. Once they get on the plane, Miller's journey to clear his name begins while keeping the feds from getting to Havens at the same time.

This film is the exact opposite of The A-Team as far as movies trying to pull off good over-the-top action sequences goes. This film was unbearable to watch from the opening scene all the way to the end scene. I was blown away by how incredibly bad this film was, coming from director James Mangold, who has done so many great films like 3:10 to Yuma, Walk the Line, Girl Interrupted and Cop Land.

The two main problems of the film is story and script. The story has been done so many times before, you could sit there and pretty much map out the entire film after only viewing twenty minutes of the movie. I'm not opposed to simple plots. Just because something has a simple plot, doesn't have to mean that it's going to be a bad movie, but in this case it is way to simple and really leaves the story lacking. How much thought went into deciding that the plot of the film was going to be about a rouge agent framing a good agent and chasing a "powerful battery" around the world for two hours? They never tell what the battery is capable of besides saying it could run a small city. That doesn't sound like anything immediately threatening to me.

Then, they try and mess with the audiences mind a little bit by entertaining the thought that maybe Cruise's character really is a bad guy. That would have been fine except for the fact that all the trailers for the movie had scenes in it that hadn't happened yet so you immediately dismiss the thought of it. That was sloppy on the marketing part for the film and insulted me as a moviegoer.

The film was all over the place. How they got to all the different places on Earth they went to in so little time is beside me. They tried to be clever and made it to where hopping around the globe so quickly was ok because Diaz was drugged, but no one will buy into that.

The chemistry between Cruise and Diaz was ok. I feel that with a better script it wouldn't have been as bad of a disaster as it was, but they had a few funny scenes. I am normally a big Cruise fan and even a Diaz fan for the most part, but this is one of Cruise's worst films. There is nothing appealing in this movie at all and I wasn't surprised afterwards when I went to look at who distributed the film......of course Twentieth Century Fox.

Knight and Day is another disappointment in a summer that has been for the most part nothing but disappointments. I give this a one out of ten.