KNIGHT AND DAY review

KNIGHT AND DAY review

Jul 19

Knight And Day is a lot like a James Bond movie told from the perspective of the Bond girl — a very special Bond girl, with an actual personality and more than a skerrick of charisma. Knight And Day is ultimately June’s (Cameron Diaz) story, and as such it easily sidesteps most of the pitfalls of espionage flicks, focusing as it does on the victim rather than the perpetrator. It’s still got its flaws, and they work extra hard to undermine the film’s solid footing, but there’s a lot more to Knight And Day than initially meets the eye.

The film chugs along with total efficiency – efficiency that borderlines on abruptness. Some scenes have been top-and-tailed to within an inch of their life, rendering them almost unintelligible without some prior experience viewing similar scenes, experience Knight And Day assumes you has.

And that’s the core of Knight And Day, both the beating heart and the rotting apple. One minute, the film will take your expectations and play with them in unpredictable ways, offering moments of pure cinema; the next minute, it’ll forget that you’ve watched movies like this before and shove clichés and plot holes in your face with gleeful abandon, abusing the trust it previously earned. The soaring highs serve to highlight the humdrum lows, and Knight And Day’s secret weapon is thus also its greatest flaw.

I don’t care what anyone else says, Tom Cruise is a great actor. If you could separate the man from his off-screen deeds – couch-jumping, Scientology, etc. – you’d probably agree with me. Here, his creepy charm is put to perfect use as the mysterious and kooky spy Roy Miller. Half the fun of the film’s first act is wondering what the heck Roy’s deal is, and wondering what crazy territory he’ll plunge us into next.

Serving as the audience’s window into Roy’s world is Cameron Diaz, who takes a well-written character and manages not to drop the ball in any spectacular fashion. June is meant to be ordinary when compared to Roy, and Diaz pulls off the girl-next-door thing pretty well; they say it’s easier to play crazy characters than “normal” people, so you have the give the woman credit for that.

Then there’s the photography, almost a character in its own right. Writing about the second trailer, I spoke of “handsome composition and eye-catching use of colour.” The gorgeous shallow-focus CinemaScope shots are present and accounted for, and they absolutely sing on the big screen; stunts, visual effects and explosions pop wondrously, and the action packs a visceral punch. The colours seem a tad muted and a bit too bronze, and some of the green-screen keying is a little hokey, but I guess you can’t have everything, can you?

Lending yet more character to the movie is its music. It moves organically between genres from scene to scene, but maintains a core style throughout; it flits fretfully between jazz, flamenco, and horn-driven film score stuff with ease, and helps to subconsciously sell the film’s international settings to you without rubbing them in your face.

Then there’s the exemplary sound design. Early on, Diaz and Cruise are talking, just chatting to each other on a plane; a routine interstate flight, on a garden variety jumbo jet. But somehow the scene is leaden with dread. I felt uneasy, and I couldn’t immediately pinpoint why.

The close-ups were borderline extreme, boxing the characters rigidly into their respective sides of the frame, but that wasn’t it – that’s a technique commonly employed in fluffy romances, too; there’s nothing creepy about that. So why did I feel so uneasy? I eventually realised – just after the scene finished – that it was the sound design that was doing it. They’d taken the general rattlings of luggage on a jumbo jet and made them sinister, adding an invisible layer of pure dread to the proceedings. Such attention to detail is a sure sign that a director has taken painstaking care of his baby.

The sound is similarly brilliant throughout, with great use of stereo panning and incidental noises like traffic, water and even the bubbling of champagne used to tell the story surprisingly well. There are a couple of lines of ADR that were carelessly thrown in to make sure the less-cognitive audience members could keep up with some of the nuttier plot twists, but that only happens three or four times, and it’s easy to overlook despite its noisy expediency.

It’s clear that director James Mangold is fluent in the language of cinema. He conducts the ballet between screen and speakers, actors and audience with startling precision. The way he uses incidental things like music and sound, and a throwaway shot of Tom Cruise being told by a video game “You Are Dead” – a notion that becomes increasingly important to the plot as time progresses — indicate a potential master at work.

But Knight And Day is not his opus. Too frequently he borrows or subverts phrases from other works, and his own voice gets lost in the disappointing third act, in which screenwriter Patrick O’Neill chooses to bring the least compelling elements of Knight And Day’s narrative – namely, Spanish gun-runners – to the fore, rather than focusing on plot elements closer to June’s heart – perhaps ex-boyfriend Rodney (Marc Blucas) should have played a larger role in the film after his amusing appearance in the first and second acts.

The film is, like so many winter blockbusters, top-heavy: the front half is packed with tight chase scenes, explosive action set-pieces and breathless half-scenes of exposition, but the pace simply can’t last. It keeps a couple of aces up its sleeve for later in the piece – Paul Dano’s chuckle-worthy performance is a highlight; and my jaw hit the floor when Dale Dye made an impromptu appearance – but the story loses steam faster than I’d have liked.

Knight And Day will struggle to find its audience. The fact that it features a realistic and compelling female protagonist in addition to having larger-than-life action scenes means that it should be consumed by men and women equally, but it’ll probably come across as too-much-like-the-other for either audience to really buy into – which is a shame, because Knight And Day is a fair sight better than your average by-the-numbers Hollywood flick.

Knight And Day’s biggest flaws are a couple of plot-holes, a reliance on recycled techniques, the irritating tendency for characters to spill their life-story at the drop of a hat, and a too-cute-to-be-true character arc for the central character. Its strengths – technical proficiency, originality, complex and satisfying layers of narrative, great performances and adrenaline-pumping action scenes – could easily get lost in the mix; but it’s all rather moot, really, because everyone’s going to see Karate Kid instead.

James Mangold is a director worth watching, and I can’t wait to see where he takes us next on his whistle-stop tour of film genres – Roy Miller told me (through June) never to lose my optimism, so my fingers are crossed for science fiction – but in the meantime, you could spend your time on worse things than Knight And Day.

Knight And Day