By Clint Morris

Bunny Hopping – Tom Cruise seems to be doing a lot of it lately. One minute he’s – if you’ll excuse the pun – cruising along at a safe and steady pace, riding in reliable vehicles like ”Mission: Impossible” and ”Jerry Maguire”, the next he’s all over the place – jumping around on couches, making movies nobody wants to see, and saying “the darndest things” in interviews.

But then Ben Stiller took hold of the controls for him. Cruise’s popularity soared back to ”Risky Business” heights when he made a surprisingly out-of-character comedy turn in friend Stiller’s ”Tropic Thunder.” Cruise’s stout and arrogant studio head, Les Grossman, was the highlight of that movie, and so good was the actor in the role that many didn’t know, until the end credits, that it was actually him behind the prosthetic gut.

Cruise was…is… popular again. Suddenly he’s not the “crazy Scientology guy” but the “crazy Tropic Thunder guy” and no doubt his PR people are glad about that.

Thing is, Cruise isn’t content on going all Sacha Baron Cohen and living out the rest of his career under the guise of, well, someone else. Sure he enjoys playing the bastard film studio character (seems to be having the time of his life actually) but he doesn’t want Grossman to overtake his career. And that’s fair enough – he’s an actor, he wants to act, play a variety of roles, not just milk the new cow until it’s teats bleed (though if Paramount have anything to say about it…). Thing is, Cruise seems to be at his most comfortable when he’s playing, well, Tom Cruise – the charming, good-looking ageless ‘movie star’. And he seemingly plans to keep playing that guy.  And that’s fine – Cruise is charismatic son of a bitch, and he’s definitely good at what he does – but dude, couldn’t you have followed up Les Grossman with another ‘character’, before reprising the-same-old-guy!?.

I said that because, if the actor’s performance in ”Tropic Thunder” proved anything it’s that the man does have more to offer than pearly white teeth and a killer smile – he can act. Someone needs to remind him of that.

”Knight and Day”, though not a huge misfire (Some of his films may not be as good as his others but they’re never bad films), isn’t going to help speed up Cruise’s return to the big leagues (that, I’m convinced, is going to be all up to the recently-announced Les Grossman movie) but it definitely won’t slow it down either.

It’s a perfectly okay movie – for someone else; it’s not the movie Cruise needs to be making right now. Audiences want Vodka from Cruise now, not Coke. And this is definitely coke – sweet, frothy, bubbly pop.

In ”Knight and Day,” Cameron Diaz plays June (Cameron Diaz), a young woman who soon discovers she’s boarded a plane with some sort of secret-agent. While June is in the loo, Roy Miller (Cruise), the charming man she’s been chatting to throughout the flight (and earlier at the airport), is taking down assassins posing as both passengers and pilots. When June returns to her seat, she’s informed by Miller that he had to kill the pilots (“Actually, I shot the first pilot then he accidentally shot the second pilot. It’s just one of those things”, Mr. Cool says) and at present, nobody is flying the plane. Typically, Miller leisurely swaggers down to the cockpit and takes the controls.

Upon landing the plane in a field, Miller reveals himself to be a secret agent wrongly accused of going rogue. He explains that he’s out to protect an energy-sustaining battery created by teen genius Simon (Paul Dano), that former partner Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard) is after.

Hysterical, and unsure whether to trust the man, June sees an opportunity to escape from Miller – but he tracks her down, ultimately convincing her that if she doesn’t stay with him, she’s dead.

Nothing about the film makes much sense – for starters, what the heck is ”Knight and Day” supposed to mean!? It’s incomprehensible!  Yes, there’s mention of a ‘Knight’ in the film (more precisely, a toy one), but it’s a throwaway reference – nothing too crucial to the storyline. As for the ‘Day’ part? Obviously the Fox titling department came up with that one while playing the ‘what goes with Knight’ game? (Personally, I might have gone with “One Night in June” – such a title may even have sold more tickets, no!?).  But it’s pretty evident that the studio really didn’t know what kind of film they had from the get-go – originally calling it ”Wichita”, because that’s the city the two lead characters first meet. Again, doesn’t tell you anything about the movie, and, quite frankly, has shit all to do with it. But even good movies have bad titles, so we can let that one slide.

What one can’t let slide is the muddled script. One can only imagine newcomer Patrick O’Neill‘s yarn read better on the page, because cinematically it runs like a thrice-repaired victor lawnmower – it’s got enough grunt in it to do the job, but it definitely doesn’t run as well as it should. There are some fun action sequences, and the dialogue works, but mostly it’s just minutes of cliches.  From TVs ”Scarecrow and Mrs. King” to ”True Lies” and more recently, ”Mr & Mrs Smith,” the ‘secret spy’ genre has been run into the ground, and if one’s going to do one, it really needs to be something special… or at least different from those other films. ”Knight and Day” is not -it’s just the same as the rest, just not as well-written as James Cameron’s “True Lies” and not as captivating as a ”Bourne Identity”. In short, it’s just ‘blah’.

Besides the few action sequences that raise a smile (one where Cruise flies off a motorbike and onto the hood of a car is a doozie), it’s Cruise and Diaz that hold the thing together – if only just. Two of the prettiest and most charismatic performers around, they know what they’re selling – and they’ve got it all on show here, as if they’re having a going-out-of-business sale. Cruise, though appreciably older, still proves he’s fit and handsome enough to play the ageless superhero, while Diaz’s killer smile and bubbly personality makes for a fun sidekick.

And, as if knowing Cruise and Diaz were the best things about the finished product, director Mangold has several trimmed down the number of scenes featuring supporting characters – Maggie Grace, for instance, playing Diaz’s on-screen sister has been reduced to a cameo; one can only imagine the character had a lot more to do in the script.

If ”Knight and Day” were Cruise’s follow-up to “Risky Business”, then that’d be quite fine. It’s a perfectly okay vehicle for a young up-and-comer. But Cruise is no up-and-comer, he’s done dozens of films, many good ones (”The Color of Money”, ”Born on the Fourth of July”, ”Jerry Maguire”, ”Vanilla Sky”, ”Minority Report”, ”Mission:Impossible”), and even earned himself a couple of Oscar Nominations along the way. It’s just too safe, and too generic a vehicle for one of the biggest movie stars in the world to be making. Cruise needs to take another Les Grossman-esque risk again – maybe he can play a woman? A despondent circus midget? A transsexual fireman? – and soon.

Someone might need to take the decisions out of Cruise’s hands. It’s a vital time for him and he needs to make “All the Right Moves”.

Extras

We were not supplied with a review disc of this title, sorry.