A few years ago, the question being bandied about the pop culture-sphere was “How crazy is Tom Cruise?” Now we’re on to the next phase, “Is there an upside to Tom Cruise’s craziness?”
Cruise’s almost-sociopathic cheerfulness amid a mind-boggling body count is the main attraction in the hyperinflated spy story Knight and Day (hate the title). Usually higher-minded director James Mangold (Walk the Line) goes popcorn with a jokey bombast that recalls nothing so much as the Arnold Schwarzenegger film True Lies.
A four-car pileup of who’s-the-villain-here plot points, Knight and Day works because of our willingness to believe that Cruise, as “rogue spy” Roy Miller, is bug-nuts as well as a one-man killing field. The blitheness with which he crashes cars and planes and liquidates perfectly ordinary looking people means that, despite his star billing, he can convincingly maintain doubt well into the last act.
Playing the role of witness-to-crazy is Cameron Diaz as June Havens, a car-aficionado en route to her sister’s wedding. At the airport, however, Cruise’s Miller repeatedly bumps into her, such that you know there’s been some kind of switcheroo.
Then the strangeness intensifies. She’s told her plane is overbooked. Then at the last minute she’s told there is, indeed, a seat. When she gets on, it’s half-empty.
Cue the insanity. From that point on, Knight and Day gets cranked up to 11, with destruction galore as Cruise drags June along on a race to find a boy genius.
Is he a protector? Or is he a hit-man that CIA operative Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard) must de-activate? It may be counterintuitive to see a spy agency acting so openly and conspicuously (this is one of the few action films I’ve ever seen that bothers to show how squirrelly the local media would go over a bunch of explosions and public exchanges of automatic weapons fire). But it’s your first clue that Knight and Day operates on its own level of heightened reality.
To her credit, Diaz takes a role that really doesn’t ask much from her (she’s literally along for the ride), and adds the extra layer of a bored singleton who finds she actually gets off on living a hairsbreadth away from death.
But it’s Cruise — whose comedic skills are suddenly being re-appreciated (courtesy, mainly, of his Tropic Thunder character Les Grossman) — who lifts the movie out of the realm of action-porn through sheer nuttiness.
His blitheness in the face of dire situations gets laughs throughout (Exhibit A: The scene in the trailers where he’s hog-tied upside-down, assuring June he’ll be there in a minute).
Of course, the anarchic fun can’t go on forever. And Knight and Day does finally take itself seriously in the last act, almost as if obeying Hollywood statute.
But though it all becomes a little pat in the end, it doesn’t erase the self-aware thrill ride that got us there.
