Monday, February 21, 2011

KNIGHT AND DAY--2010


Rated Pg-13

Stars: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Paul Dano
Director: James Mangold
Genre: Action-Adventure/Comedy

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz have explosive chemistry, you might say, in Knight And Day--a formula action flick which pretty much amounts to one big, wild shootout spree, with a few exotic locales thrown in to try to put a pretty face on all that death and destruction.

Cruise is Roy Miller, a rogue CIA agent who is playing caretaker to boy genius Simon Feck, (Paul Dano) who has invented a battery--referred to as the Zephyr-which never runs down ( it keeps going, and going, and...). This, of course, could change the world, (not to mention the lives of all parents with little kids, especially on Christmas morning) so a bunch of bad dudes from the government as well as a Spanish arms dealer are after Miller and Feck, so they can get the battery and become all powerful and rich (ERRRRHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!) The baddies, of course, are willing to kill whomever they need to, to get their hands on said battery, and Miller is willing to kill all of the baddies--and he does, in those endless shootout scenes--where, like every action movie hero, he gets fired at hundreds of times, but never gets hit by the traveling GANG THAT COULDN'T SHOOT STRAIGHT that is also in every similarly themed movie.

Cameron Diaz is June Havens, the clueless twit who falls in with Miller when they share a plane flight. The budding romance between the two of them occurs, literally, between extended bursts of gunfire. At one point, Miller shoots a guy and June responds by saying I FEEL LIKE HAVING SEX! We're not supposed to take seriously that only a highly disturbed person in real life would say that under those circumstances, nor should we take any note that neither of these characters feels the slightest bit of revulsion or regret about taking lives as the bodies pile up--they just breeze along in their cavalier way with their witty TV sitcom dialogue.

At one point, June shouts: STOP THE SHOOTING...PLEASE STOP THE SHOOTING! She can't hear herself think, you see. Yes, Knight And Day is a romp--cute and clever in its way--with incredible action scenes, though it relies a bit too heavily on CGI...but seriously, when ARE they going to stop the shooting? Why do films like Knight And Day, and Salt, and all the others that have essentially reduced mindless violence to a video game, continue to get made? I'm the last dude who would advocate censorship, but we need to stop and ask ourselves WHY--in the good ol' USA--are we obsessed with this kind of crap? Are we so tense, angry, and frustrated as a people that we need this to give us some kind of release? Maybe so, or there might be more Jared Laughners being spawned than there already are.

Decadence glossed over...and the beat goes on.

GRADE: C