James Mangold has had an interesting directorial career.  He’s worked in such wildly disparate genres as police drama (Cop Land), asylum movie (Girl, Interrupted), high concept romantic comedy (Kate & Leopold), horror (Identity), biopic (Walk the Line), and western (3:10 to Yuma).  All these films have been more or less well-received (and won Angelina Jolie and Reese Witherspoon Academy Awards) and at the very least stylistically interesting.  Now with Knight and Day, Mangold has set his sights on the action movie.  As noted in an earlier review, the key to action movies is fun.  Some movies lack it and suffer for it (Robin Hood) and some have it in abundance (The A-Team, although apparently that isn’t helping it at the box office).  Can Mangold walk the line (ha-ha, movie pun) between entertaining and absurd?

What the movie relies upon more than anything else is casting.  Tom Cruise plays Roy Miller and Cameron Diaz plays June Havens.  Um… given the title I sort of assumed the main character’s surnames would be Knight and Day but whatever.  As it is only the “Knight” part of the title is explained which means the “day” part is just a cheap pun.  I know I’m hardly the person to be criticizing cheap puns but still, come on.  Roy and June bump into each other at the airport (literally).  They strike up a casual flirtation after boarding their plane.  One thing leads to another… and then the plane is crashing because Roy shot the pilots.  It seems Roy is a secret agent and caught up in some big mess that now, unfortunately for her, involves June.

Where this movie scores a big check mark in the “win” column is in the casting of Tom Cruise.  Nowadays, Cruise is known primarily for his outlandish behavior, hot younger wife, and crazy religion (though since I was raised in a faith premised on a dead dude coming back to life, maybe I shouldn’t be so judgmental).  People forget he’s a movie star for a reason.  You wouldn’t always remember from the way he coasts through movies like Valkyrie or The Last Samurai but somewhere behind the youthful features and wide grin lays the mind of an able actor.  Lately though, I think Tom realizes that he has enough money and mostly just wants to do things that interest him.  So he does movies like Collateral and Tropic Thunder and we get to be reminded that “hey, this guy’s a three-time Oscar nominee.”  Even in popcorn movies like War of the Worlds, he took an underwritten single dad character and tried to give it more depth, making him into that weird guy everyone knows who’s 40 but thinks he’s still in high school.  When he’s trying he’s capable of doing good things.  In Knight and Day, Cruise is trying.  He takes a thinly written secret agent character and brings this manic insanity to it.  You ever see one of those interviews where he goes crazy and jumps on couches or whatever?  It’s like that but with guns.  “Ambiguously insane” seems to be well within Cruise’s comfort zone as an actor.

Faring less well is Cameron Diaz.  I like Cameron Diaz.  There’s something inherently likable about her.  For a tall leggy blonde in great shape she seems… I don’t know, almost approachable.  That sort of charm works well for her in the earlier scenes where she’s just a woman flirting with a guy on an airplane.  Then the action kicks in and her character kind of falls apart.  She’s supposed to be confused, scared, and oddly attracted to this ambiguously insane secret agent.  “Confused” is the part of that description that actually comes through.  For most of this movie Diaz looks like she’s not really sure what she should be doing.  To clarify, I’m not saying the character June Havens looks like she doesn’t know what to do (which is totally understandable in the context of the plot) but more like the actress Cameron Diaz does not know how to play the role.

There is a plot to this movie.  It’s about a scientist (Paul Dano from Little Miss Sunshine and There Will Be Blood) and his invention or something.  The bad guy is an agent who may more or may not be rogue played by Peter Sarsgaard (An Education, The Salton Sea).  Viola Davis (Far From Heaven, Doubt) plays the head of the agency.  These characters are all paper thin and really serve mostly as pretext to drive the plot from action sequence to action sequence.  Maggie Grace from Lost has a nothing role in two scenes as June’s sister April (They’re both name after months!  Get it?).  Of the supporting character the one who fares best is Marc Blucas (TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as Rodney, June’s oblivious ex-boyfriend.

There are several well-choreographed action scenes that also display a sense of humor.  There’s a great fight scene early in the film on a plane.  There’s also a warehouse shootout and pretty well-done car chase.  Perhaps best of all there’s a motorcycle chase through the streets of a Spanish city during the running of the bulls (PG-13 though, so no explicit goring).  All of these scenes are executed with a sense of fun that is all-important in movies like this.  There is one part however where an action is sort of skipped over and only implied.  This is handled humorously, but then the movie goes and does it again, which just feels like sort of a cop-out.  Then towards the end it does it a third time (though it doesn’t feel like as much of a cop-out that last time).  The problem in Knight and Day isn’t the action scenes, but rather everything in between.  There was a plot that’s already grown hazy in my mind.  There was definitely chemistry between Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, as there was nine years ago in Vanilla Sky (where he was sane and she was crazy) but I have difficultly recalling specifics.

It’s easy to write a good review where I sing the praises of a movie I loved.  It’s also pretty easy to write a bad review where I dump on a film I hated.  Knight and Day presents the challenge of reviewing kind of a middle-of-the-road film.  I enjoyed it but just a couple hours later I’m already pretty foggy on a lot of the plot details.  It’s not a particularly good movie but it’s definitely not a bad one either.  Rent it on Netflix when the time comes or better yet just wait until it’s on HBO.  Going back to the overly pun-ish title of this article it’s like the movie is on cruise control.  It reaches a certain speed and then just coasts to its destination without as much effort.

Anyway, sorry for no article last week.  Personal stuff came up.  You understand.  From what I hear Jonah Hex is pretty awful.  Cyrus didn’t open in Sacramento so I can’t even see that one yet.  Toy Story 3 was every bit as amazing as I hoped it would be.  I’m thinking about seeing Grown-Ups tonight and getting another review up tomorrow morning to atone for my missing week (plus I feel kind of lame reviewing a movie that’s already been out for two days).  Anyway, in the spirit of shameless self-promotion you can find my mini-reviews of every movie I see here and follow me on Twitter @JakeBrooks665.  I’ll be back next week with a new article.  I will NOT be reviewing The Twilight Saga: Eclipse because that would mean having to see it and I suffered enough with New Moon… anyway, until then.