By Govindini Murty. It seems that the two major new releases this weekend are Knight and Day, starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, and Grown Ups, starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, and Salma Hayek. So one has the choice this weekend of either watching a group of adults behave like overgrown children – in Baby Boomer Hollywood’s ongoing infantilization of adulthood in Grown Ups - or one can watch Cruise and Diaz play adults stuck in a state of perpetual, toothy-grinned adolescence in Knight and Day. At least adolescence is an advance in maturity over childhood, so I chose to review Knight and Day this weekend.
Knight and Day is a romantic action-comedy in which Cameron Diaz plays a simple, down to earth country girl from Wichita who gets unexpectedly whisked off on an international spy adventure with a dashing secret agent played by Tom Cruise. The plot centers around a top-secret invention – a tiny battery that is a perpetually self-renewing source of energy (“the first since the sun,” as Cruise’s character helpfully puts it). Cruise must protect the battery from a host of nasty people who are out to get it – ranging from CIA operatives to Spanish arms dealers – while protecting/romancing Diaz at the same time.
This should have been a fun and sexy romp. Cruise and Diaz are two attractive people who were good foils for each other in Vanilla Sky (however silly that movie may have been), and their reunion in this film should have been a sure thing. Not only does Knight and Day feature two star leads, the film goes on a globe-hopping adventure from Kansas to Boston to the Azores to Austria to Spain, with many glamorous settings along the way. A great deal of money is spent on hectic action scenes and on some great fashions (I love Cameron Diaz’s tailored menswear-as-womenswear in the film – very Stella McCartney meets Giambattista Valli).
However, Knight and Day moves in strange fits and starts, and spends way too much time on drawn-out, archly ironic dialogue scenes between Cruise and Diaz that just fall flat. There are violent action scenes that pop out of nowhere with car crashes and women being gratuitously punched and thousands of rounds of bullets flying through the air – interspersed with glacial scenes of comedy in which Diaz and Cruise flash toothy smiles at each other and trade desultory witticisms. The overall effect is oppressive and cloying.
Knight and Day should have picked up the pace by making the comedy scenes as rapid-fire as the action scenes (think of how the jokes keep flying in His Girl Friday, or in the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby “Road” movies) – or the filmmakers should have junked the script altogether and filmed a Beckett play instead, if they wanted to go the post-modern-irony-with-long-awkward-pauses route. As for romance, forget that – there is almost none in the film. Knight and Day misses countless opportunities for romance between Diaz and Cruise, and all they ultimately share are a couple of kisses. Violence replaces romance in the film. Cruise and Diaz are on a romantic train ride going through the Austrian Alps, but instead of romance there’s only a violent action scene. Cruise and Diaz are in a romantic hotel in Salzburg, but instead of romance there’s a violent action scene. One thinks by contrast of Hitchcock’s infinitely better North By Northwest, in which the master had no trouble conjuring romance between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint on trains, in hotel rooms, and even on Mount Rushmore – without sacrificing a moment of adventure or suspense. Indeed, in the best thrillers, the romance is an inextricable part of the adventure and suspense. Knight and Day is oblivious to all of this, and as a result it winds up being not enough of an action movie, not enough of a comedy, and certainly not enough of a romance to engage anyone for long.
I would have forgiven all of that – because Knight and Day is really just mediocre, not awful – but I can’t forgive the fact that once again the CIA are the villains in the film. I know we’re all supposed to be used to this by now because the CIA have been the villains in countless films, and the audience has become so numbed to this that nobody even cares anymore, but I for one am sick and tired of seeing the CIA demonized in movie after movie. Between the Bourne films, the Mission Impossible films, The Good Shepherd, the upcoming Salt, and now Knight and Day, the CIA is portrayed in Hollywood’s films as the most murderous, villainous, duplicitous and corrupt organization on the planet. You would think that the CIA is worse than the KGB, Gestapo, Cosa Nostra, Bilderburgers, and Al Qaeda put together – and that’s really just ludicrous. And what does it do to our real intelligence efforts overseas when this kind of anti-American and anti-CIA propaganda is broadcast around the world? Can Hollywood just find some new villains?
The bottom line is that Knight and Day squanders whatever modest entertainment capital it might have by featuring the agents of its home country – America – as the villains. Such a tired plot device, redolent of ’60s Baby Boomer rebellion, is just another symptom of the current film establishment’s refusal to grow up.
(Knight and Day opens this week nationwide and is directed by James Mangold. The film is rated PG-13 and is 1hour 50 minutes in length.)
Posted on June 26th, 2010 at 2:53am.
Yes! Yes! Yes! We are getting so tired of CIA bashing in films! Thank you so much for saying this so forcefully Govindini. New villains please. It is not just films. Lately I have been reading the novels of David Baldacci and while they are always well written and fascinating page-turners that are hard to put down with wonderful characters, again, I find myself saying, “Why do the villains so often turn out to be people working for the US government?” What is it within the current American creative psyche that makes screenwriters and novelists keep coming up with this pattern? It is surely something unhealthy in the cultural mental make-up and something that needs to be fixed!
Thank you Looksoverpark – I agree completely! It has become a very tiresome plot device, and it really concerns me what effect this stuff has when it is sent around the world. American popular culture is so enormously influential – and there are many people around the world who take this kind of portrayal of the CIA as the literal truth. As for what this reveals about the current American creative psyche, as you well put it, I think that is ultimately a matter for psychologists to figure out. This sort of American self-loathing amongst our creative class is so deranged (just look at “Avatar”), that I think it is now beyond cultural analysis and is now almost a medical problem. I wonder what a psychologist/psychiatrist would have to say about this issue?
I saw this movie on Wednesday and agree a 100% with your review. I really believe that We’re seeing a crisis of literate screenwriting, complete loss of the movie making craft and please GOD stop using the CIA as a foil. It was nothing original and in reality you don’t even have to be original, just be competent and even that seems impossible for Hollywood. Cameron Diaz can sparkle on the screen and they made her as boring as dishwater. There was a scene late in the movie when she’s taken hostage and given a truth serum that makes her coquettish. They do nothing with it! It’s dropped completely. I’m finding that each successive year that movies are getting worse and the decent to good ones are completely overrated. The latest example is Toy Story 3, which is very very good but not on par as it’s being portrayed to the first two Toy Story movies.
Yes, johngaltjkt, I totally agree with you that it’s a real problem of basic movie-making craft. Hollywood is so unused to competition (because it has such a monopoly on the film industry) that it has grown intellectually and artistically flabby. The screenwriting, editing, and direction on $100 million dollar plus films is often so bad that I’m amazed. I think it’s literally because the studios have so much power, between owning not only the means of production but also TV channels, radio stations, entertainment magazines, internet sites, etc. that they think they can just put this stuff in 3000 theaters and spend $60 million on marketing and brainwash everyone into thinking its good. That’s why they don’t bother doing a better job.
Also, it’s a problem of our education system. Things have been so dumbed down that you have screenwriters and development executives in their early 20s who barely know how to read, let alone come up with good stories and scripts. As you say, there is so much more they could have done with this film to develop the humor and romance. That scene with the truth serum could have been great! She could have really said a lot of funny stuff, but it was just dropped. Another opportunity lost.
This is why we cover a lot of independent and classic films on LFM – they’re often the only films with high quality writing and direction any more, and we personally find them a lot more inspiring as writers and filmmakers. You have to watch the good stuff as often as possible to keep your own personal standards up.
Me again – realize I didn’t spell villains correctly. Hope you will fix that for me!
Yes – I will fix it – thanks again for commenting!
the agents of its home country – America – as the villains.
This is only true if you assume that the movie was made for the American audience. For the world audience this is great, there’s probably a movie reviewer in Spain or Indonesia typing away right now about how great this movie is. She may be noting how even Amercian movie makers know the CIA is evil.
Are we the only country stupid and venal enough to make world class quality propaganda movies about how horrible we are – because the investors are mostly from Saudi Arabia? That would have to be a “yes” I think.
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