AD

Thursday 24 March 2011

Watch the trailer for Knight & Day (review)



When June Havens meets an attractive man called Roy Miller, she has no idea what she's getting herself into. Roy is a secret agent who's on a mission to protect a powerful energy source. From the outset of their relationship, it seems Roy is fear free and willing to do anything to protect his package. The now fugitive couple must stick together and race across the globe on a deadly adventure. 


Starring: Tom CruiseCameron DiazMaggie GracePaul DanoPeter SarsgaardMarc BlucasViola DavisOlivier Martinez 




Cast & Crew
Director : James Mangold
Producer : Todd Garner, Cathy Konrad, Steve Pink, Joe Roth
Screenwriter : Patrick O'Neill

This is a breezy, brainless action rom-coms like they used to make in the 1980s starring Mel Gibson as a crazy spy and Goldie Hawn and the ditsy but feisty woman he meets along the way. Yes, it's terrible, but it's also undemanding fun. 


After June (Diaz) bumps into Roy (Cruise) in the airport, she finds herself in a mid-air shootout and a cornfield crash-landing. But she wakes up at home as if everything is fine. And so continues her adventure, as Royturns out to be a possibly rogue federal agent trying to stay one step ahead of the spies chasing him (Davis and Sarsgaard) and keep June safe from the bad guys as they dart to the Azores and across Europe, where they meet a technology nerd (Dano) and a smirking arms dealer (Molla). 


Screenwriter O'Neill and director Mangold clearly can't be bothered with story coherence, as theynever bother to explain how we get from each action set piece to the next. Actually, this is one of the better running gags in this lazily thrown together movie. They seem to think that merely having Cruise and Diaz in the central roles is enough to hold our interest. Which in a way it is. 


Diaz does ditsy-feisty well and Cruise is watchable in self-deprecating action-slapstick mode. Butseveral rather important questions still nag at us. 
Why does highly trained, cold-hearted Roy continually risk everything to save June? Why doesn't the razor-sharp Davis notice that the puffy-looking Sarsgaard is a bit shifty? How do Roy and Junemanage to kind of fall for each other when their whole relationship is merely a few sassy one-liners? 


But we don't buy tickets to movies like this to see sensible storylines and deep characters; we want overwrought, effects-heavy action and sexless banter between big movie stars. We can overlook the fact that people die at an alarming rate all through the movie because we know our heroes won'teven muss their expensive haircuts (Roy's early bullet wound miraculously heals in time for his shirtless scene, to say nothing of June's magical bridesmaid dress). 
Sometimes we just want some dumb escapism. Well, here it is. 

No comments:

Post a Comment