Changing Lanes

A movie that is trying to be a comedy and an action movie at the same time can go wrong in a lot of ways and unfortunately 'Knight and Day' was one of those movies that went horribly wrong in almost every possible way. Directed by James Mangold whose last directional venture was '3:10 to Yuma' (a movie I liked a lot), it was disappointed to see this quality of work coming from him.

The problem does not lie with the concept which revolves around a secret agent Roy Miller (played by Tom Cruise) who's being hunted by his own agency because they believe he has gone rogue while he tries to clear his name, James bond style. His love interest is played by the completely ordinary June Havens (played by Cameron Diaz) whose character revolves around being the damsel in distress who gets saved by Roy Miller every single time. Now this has been done a million times over and can still be successful on an average level if executed well which is surely not the case here.

The problem with 'Knight and Day' is the lead cast. Tom Cruise is old, and just because he manages to extract some abs out of his tummy at this age does not change the fact that watching him doing stunts that you would expect a much younger actor to do is a little implausible. Cameron Diaz on the other hand looked older than she has in any other movie that I've seen of hers and very tired. I don't know if it was the makeup or the lack of it but it does remove the slight quirky edge out of her character. Then there was the chemistry. It was hard to watch them romance each other in ways you'd expect 20 something people to do. It was mid life crisis on the big screen or something along those lines and it didn't look good.

And then there was the feeling that this was just Mission Impossible 4 for Tom Cruise with a bit of comedy thrown in it. Mission Impossible 3 was bad enough, this one just felt worse. Also the lack of any substantial support characters didn't help either nor did the jokes that fell flat most of the time and just got half hearted laughs from most the crowd. Even the CGI was poorly done.

The only saving grace was some of the action was nicely executed while Tom Cruise was good in patches. Even Cameron Diaz managed to save some face at the end when she managed to play the part of being drugged by a truth serum convincingly.

In the end, I honestly regret going for this movie in the theatre.