Knight and Day attempts to walk a delicate tightrope, simultaneously parodying and indulging in outrageous super-spy action, and fails in both endeavors. James Mangold’s big-budget snooze features Tom Cruise as Roy Miller, a rogue secret agent man who may also be insane. This possibility greatly disturbs June Havens (Cameron Diaz), the classic car-restoring mechanic (ha!) who becomes unwittingly embroiled in Roy’s efforts to evade arms dealers and federal officers who want the perpetual energy battery in his possession. This coveted object is a serviceable MacGuffin, but Mangold’s wannabe-jaunty globe-hopping film is a far cry from Hitchcockian, going through its CG-enhanced set pieces and playful Cruise-Diaz banter with more dutifulness than inspiration. Striving for a balance between gravity and goofiness, the story as a whole, and Cruise’s performance in particular, prove incapable of selling either successfully, so that when Roy engages in an airline fight against anonymous thugs – a skirmish that involves both brutal deaths and jokes about crotch knifings – there’s neither humor or tension, just the visible strain of performers vainly vacillating between disparate modes. A few of the numerous gags stick, such as one in which June periodically awakens from drug-induced sleep to catch glimpses of Roy spiriting her away from dangerous predicaments (now she’s on a boat, now she’s jumping from a plummeting plane, etc.). Yet by and large, Knight and Day’s humor undercuts its suspense and its attentiveness to blockbuster genre demands (giant set pieces, dialogue awash in one-liners) drags down any sense of levity, thereby stranding its game cast in an adventure short on playfulness and long on desperation.
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