Knight And Day - DVD Review

'what happens every time we need to move from one place to another? Someone drugs someone else to ensure the transition doesn't need explaining. There are almost as many passed-out, drug-haze shots in Knight And Day as there are in Pineapple Express'

During one scene in Knight And Day, Roy (Tom Cruise) is seen waving at June (Cameron Diaz) as the bike he's driving ascends a motorway ramp running parallel to the one June and her car are on, eventually disappearing out of shot once he's high enough. A second later, the bike splashes down into some water on June's right, without Roy. Then Roy's helmet lands on June's bonnet. Then Roy lands on June's bonnet. There's some smiling and laughing, Roy shoots a few people and ends up in the car with June. This is the kind of film Knight And Day is.

To say that Knight And Day is an action-comedy would be to misrepresent the facts. When you say 'action-comedy' people think of Lethal Weapon 4 or Beverly Hills Cop; action films with some jokes in them. Knight And Day is a different beast altogether. There are some one-liners sure, and some inevitable romantic wordplay between the leads, but really, this is a film where the action is the comedy. The trailer, which features a motorcycle chase through a bullring and the bit where June 'goes on one', is representative of the rest of the film; big, loud, jumpy action sequences which are played for broadly comedic value rather than any hint of realism, tacked on to a plot about Paul Dano and his never-ending battery. And you know what? It all kind of works.

That isn't to say Knight And Day is a rip-roaring success (it isn't). The script is overly reliant on Dano's MacGuffin to the point where it appears no-one actually paused to figure out how characters get from one place to the next. We visit Vienna and Seville and The Inside Of A Train and Boston and A Desert Island, and what happens every time we need to move from one place to another? Someone drugs someone else to ensure the transition doesn't need explaining. There are almost as many passed-out, drug-haze shots in Knight And Day as there are in Pineapple Express.

That Knight And Day comes out just on the right side of average is really a triumph for director James Mangold. Genre-mashes like this face a constant battle to remain both watchable and enjoyable and in the end Mangold's film is both, succeeding where others have failed in terms of a fairly balanced tone and an absence of completely hammy acting. Credit for the latter point must be delivered to Cruise and Diaz. Whilst Diaz screams all the right screams, Cruise is much more subdued here than in any recent work. The role is incredibly close to Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt and Cruise knows it, leaving Hunt's heart-on-his-sleeve heroism behind in favour of Roy's quiet-but-not-cold spy play. Occasionally, Mangold loses his wafer-thin plot in a faux-twist mish-mash but what he never loses is his sense of fun or his cast's winning smiles.

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'There's simply not enough in the engine to go the distance. It can be oddly charming at times, even quite a bit humorous, but never to the level it needs to be for sustained interest' - A Life In Equinox, 5/10