Knight & Day DVD Review




Title: Knight and Day
Stars: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz and Peter Sarsgaard
Director: James Mangold
Writer: Patrick O'Neill
Rating: 12A
Duration: 109 mins

Knight and Day is an undeniably fun film. Tom Cruise – he’s funny, and he’s not scared of poking fun at himself either – his cameo performance in Tropic Thunder has to go down as one of the finest in recent memory. Outstanding. His performance in Magnolia was exceptional too. Plus he can really act as well of course, he was brilliant in Collateral and also simply stunning in Vanilla Sky.

Knight and Day sees Cruise as a sort of trained assassin/super-agent. He stars alongside Cameron Diaz as an everyday woman looking for some excitement in her life. When she meets Cruise's character, boy does she get it. Back to Diaz, I didn’t really enjoy Charlie’s Angels but you have to say that Diaz is an actress that knows how to have fun and pick the exciting roles, from her earliest role as a smoking-hot blonde-bombshell in The Mask to a trio of kooky roles in There's Something About Mary, Very Bad Things and Being John Malkovich, all the way up to date with fairly recent, fairly decent comedies such as The Holiday and What Happens in Vegas, she’s always entertaining. And even when she’s in a less-than-a-blockbuster type of film, she’s still the best thing in it. That’s truly one of the marks of a good actor – the film might not be great, but the actor can transcend the material and pull a great performance out of the bag and still retain audience respect. Cruise and Diaz can both do this. Fortunately with Knight and Day they don’t need to, it’s a fun, exciting film full of car chases, motorbikes, planes, trains, speedboats and explosions, gun fights and rooftop chases. Not to mention a dizzying number of locations including Boston, Seville, little Pacific islands where spies and the like hang out when they’re in hiding, as well as the Alps and the Caribbean.

knight and Day DVDTom Cruise is Roy Miller a secret agent who comes to the rescue of June Havens played by Cameron Diaz, trouble is June doesn’t exactly want to be saved, know that she potentially even needs to be saved, or from who. They both produce excellent performances. They may not be Oscar-worthy but that’s not what the script, or the film, calls for.

Cruise and Diaz are light and breezy, likable and fun, exactly what is required. They keep the film afloat even when at times it looks a bit iffy. Director James Mangold proves he is the right man for the job by directing with skill and precision.

Overall Knight and Day is a really fun film that might not linger long in the memory but will still reward repeat viewing for the many laughs along the way.

Author : Kevin Stanley