Knight and Day, (formerly titled Wichita and Trouble Man) is a 2010 action comedy film starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. The film, directed by James Mangold, is Cruise and Diaz’s second on-screen collaboration following the 2001 film Vanilla Sky.

If there is one thing that Tom Cruise understands it is how to be a movie star. He has been doing it successfully since he helped make subway travel so sexy in his breakout hit Risky Business (1983).

Cruise still has his boyish grin working at age 48 and puts it to good use in Knight and Day, a movie that engages us with comedic spy vs spy antics that provide the skill and panache that the summer’s previous spy comedy, Killers, failed at miserably.

The improvement comes with a director, James Mangold (Walk the Line) who knows how to balance action and character development, a script that gives him a solid blueprint (by Patrick O’Neill) to do just that and the aforementioned star power of Tomcat, with a valuable assist from Cameron Diaz. She also knows a thing or two about when to flash her killer grin. Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz vs Aston Kutcher and Katherine Heigl is no contest.

Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) is a spy on a mission who bumps into likable June (Cameron Diaz) at the airport. This encounter puts her under suspicion as an accomplice by the two bad guys, an arms dealer and a rogue American agent respectively, who want what Roy has, the ultimate power source. As Alfred Hitchcock would remind us, this is the MacGuffin, the classic movie gambit. It is the object of desire, a movie device that allows us to fall in love with our hero and heroine on the run as they protect it from those that would use it for evil.

This particular story also involves a human MacGuffin, the socially inept nerd inventor Simon Feck (Paul Dano), who loves the music of Hall & Oates. Roy needs to protect him and his balance-of-power altering invention.

What makes this summer popcorn fling feel like a real movie is the anchor of its characters. They might be flying around on an impossible mission in various exotic locations across the globe, but in the quiet moments we learn about them and why they are worth caring about. Those quiet moments are placed perfectly, like emotional depth charges that explode and energize the enjoyment factor.

Mangold and his screenwriter have provided just the right amount of character insight to engage us, but not too much to slow down the action. That is a balancing act that has been missing from too many movies of late. The other element that makes Knight and Day stand out is that the action scenes, while big and bold and loaded with CGI effects, do not have the horrible choppiness that smacks of video game inspiration. They might be CGI bulls chasing a car in the streets of a Spanish town, but we can feel the rush, we are willing to suspend our disbelief to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Knight and Day has enough butter on the popcorn to make this movie flavorful and fun. I personally recommend this fun ride for a movie date.
Resources: Wikipedia | IMDb | Yahoo! Movies

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Official Movie Poster

Singapore Date: 23rd June 2010 Language: English Running Time: 110 mins Rating: PG Genre: Action | Comedy | Thriller Tagline: - Starring: Tom Cruise, Olivier Martinez, Cameron Diaz, Viola Davis, Peter Sarsgaard Directed by: James Mangold Company: New Regency Pictures Singapore Distributor: 20th Century Fox iZone Rating: 7/10 Official Website : Knight And Day

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Movie Trailer

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