Knight and Day Review

Knight and Day is a difficult movie to review. It gets a lot of things right, but then again gets a lot of things wrong. It's a confused action romcom with decent acting and special effects, but is burdened with a poor plot and equally poor writing.

The plot is Knight and Day is ridiculous. Knight and Day follows Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) who is a secret agent running from these evil folks. He runs into June (Cameron Diaz) on an airplane, and then their adventure begins. After surviving a plane crash, they are sent into a frenzy of firefights and chases that never seem to end. It seemed like for every non-action scene there was, there were 3 more action scenes. They weren't terrible, but it seemed like the plot went nowhere because bad guys would jump out of nowhere and then they would attack. The ending is equally as silly, and when it finally reaches the end, it doesn't deliver. This same action romcom formula has been done millions of times before, with Killers, The Bounty Hunter, Date Night, etc. Knight and Day needed to distance itself from the others, and it didn't follow through.

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz do a good job together. They have decent chemistry, and the characters they played were funny and enjoyable. Cruise played super-cool spy guy who kills people and moves on, and Diaz played his "kidnapee" who is in shock for half of the film. It's funny, and it works. The writing however, doesn't. The writing is stupid, non-sensical, and there were so many writing cliches and one-liners that I couldn't help but laugh at. All the while the movie was trying to be serious, and when Cruise delivers some stupid line, I can't take the movie seriously anymore.

Where Knight and Day does deliver, is in the special effects area. Since there were action scenes abound, one might expect them to get lazy with effects, but no. Cruise and Diaz did most of their own stunts, and there are some scenes that will make you go "wow". It's a bit upsetting, though, that that's all the movie has going for it, because Knight and Day had a lot of potential.

Knight and Day isn't terrible, but it doesn't do much to distance itself from a world full of action romcoms. It's a good movie, and it's worth a rent, but don't expect it to blow you away.

Overall: 2.5/5.0