In the first scene of James Mangold's Knight and Day, Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz - two beautiful Hollywood stars - bump into each other by crisis in an airport - twice. The charming Cruise and the flustered Diaz change a few words, then part, headed for their flights. Then, a third coincidence, Diaz ends up on the same flight with Cruise. And what a flight it turns out to be! He kills every person in the plane while she is powdering her face in the rest room. When she emerges, having worked up the courage to flirt with this handsome stranger, he casually tells her that he killed all the passengers - including the pilots. And he does it with that Tom Cruise smile.
Critics had their knives out for Cruise, fresh from a merge of bombs and unfortunate talk show appearances. That smile drove them into a frenzy. The Chicago Tribune wrote that the producers were "willing to overlook a galumphing mediocrity in order to merge on matters of dentistry." Really? Time Out New York wrote: "This smug and callous action-comedy is about nothing but teeth." Could this be a new genre? The dental spy comedy? Wait, there's more. The Wall road Journal saw "desperation" in "Tom Cruise's fixed grin."
Knives
That last one truly hurts. Say what you like about Cruise's sofa-surfing, but leave The Grin alone. Honestly, did anyone think this scene might be a parody? Roy Miller kills every person on the plane. He's a bad guy. And if he's a good guy he uses unnecessary roughness. And yet he is utterly casual. He lands the plane; he's a pilot of course. Then he drugs Diaz and transports her to her sister's house - that was her destination.
Later, he catches up with her and they become embroiled in a ridiculous car chase. Cruise jumps onto the window of her car - it's just like a scene from Lethal Weapon 4 - and tries to charm her by smiling and production faces. A slight later she asks him to stop killing people, but he has to go and kill more people. Through all of this, he has an endearing habit of production small talk while bullets are whizzing nearby the two of them.
And - speaking of whizzing bullets - later in the movie, when Diaz decides she's in love with the violent, delusional, Cruise - who has drugged her twice and undressed her while she was unconscious - she asks for a kiss. Cruise, standing in an Italian-style courtyard, walks past a blizzard of bullets - all conveniently missing him - to give her a kiss. Ridiculous!
Do summer blockbusters get any worse? The Uk Globe and Mail thinks not: "None of it makes any sense, but the strategy here is that the tongue-in-cheek lightness of the movie will be infectious enough to make us overlook the inconsistencies."
Okay, that's it. See "Knight and Day" again. Think of it as an modernize of Hot Shots, Part Deux or The Naked Gun. The inconsistencies are the whole point!
There, I said it.
Writer Patrick O'Neill makes fun of the way operation movies ignore the mayhem and violence their heroes cause - as long as the heroes have a charming smile. He has a laugh about the way James Bond, Jason Bourne, or Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible character) seem to know everything, to be able to do everything, and to be able to make anyone happen. He winks at the audience about the outrageous good luck these characters seem to have. And, finally, he laughs at the ease with which heroes and heroines fall in love in the midst of the chaos, confusion, and bad dream they have just endured.
Knight and Day is a hoot. A long-overdue satire of the crass Hollywood operation film.
Did anyone get it? No. Even the clever folks at The New York Times missed the point: Knight and Day was "a loud, seemingly interminable, and altogether incoherent entry."
Audiences may be even more clever. After the critics declared the film a bomb upon its Wednesday issue opposite Toy Story 3, the story was over. They blamed it on the movie's faults, of course, but also on bad marketing, Tom Cruise's image problems, and, of course, Toy Story 3.
But the story continues. After only 13 days in issue Knight and Day has made over million out of a funds of 7 million. Its box office has been steady for the past four days (today is July 5th), and it's the fourth biggest movie in spite of the issue of some high-profile vampire flicks.
Perception and reality can be like night and day. But that's kind of the point of the movie, isn't it?
"Knight and Day" Widely Misunderstood