Suddenly In the Life

Tom Cruise can very often be Box Office gold. People love to see him go off and try to kill himself in any number of creative ways. When you go to a Tom Cruise movie, even one that obviously uses some amount of CGI, you can still trust that when he can, the man is doing his own stunts. Running, driving, motorcycle riding, lunging off cliffs, throwing himself onto trains, the man will do it all. It's a good film when Tom Cruise shows up to be Tom Cruise all over that action.

Released in between Mission: Impossible III and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Knight and Day feels like a send up of the very character Tom Cruise was becoming in theaters. He hadn't yet become fully known for doing all his own stunts, but it was clear that he relished being able to go off and do incredible things on Hollywood's dime. The film promises all of that, plus romance, comedy, and just a little bit of heart.

And it delivered. Although the trailers had a hard time selling the film -- "Is it an action film? Is it a romantic comedy? Audiences simply won't understand that it's both!" -- but those that have watched it can attest that Knight and Day is a fun, frothy little film that just so happens to also be a fun little espionage actioner. It's not super deep, or all that action packed (although it does have a few good scenes), but it does have a lot of fun and, sometimes, that's all the really matters.

June Havens (Cameron Diaz) has a successful business (she inherited from her father) restoring classic cars. On a trip out to Wichita to buy parts, June runs into Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) at the airport. He seems nice, and they have a couple of meet-cutes as they make their way to the plane. Although she's told that the plane is booked and she'd have to stay behind (which immediately sets off Roy's alarm bells), eventually she's let on. When we see that the plane is suspiciously empty, though, we realize that something nasty is going on.

As it turns out, Roy is a secret agent. He'd been put in charge of a project with his partner, John Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard), but then is partner betrayed the project and was going to steal what they were working on. So Roy stole it first and has been on the run ever since. The agency has tracked him down and tries to kill him on the plane but Roy is able to take them all out and escape, with June in tow (for her own protection). Now the two are stuck together as June has to learn to adapt to life with a secret agent, all so he can save the world (and maybe the two can fall in love as well).

Directed by James Mangold (of 3:10 to Yuma, Logan, and the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), Knight and Day is a light and fun film that absolutely understand what kind of film it needs to be. That's actually something I think Mangold really gets; the director (who has been directing since 1995 and yet only has 12 films under his belt) is clearly picky about the projects he takes on, choosing films where he can really craft the right story. In this case, that's a light and fun spy-romantic-comedy. It's odd, but it really works.

Part of that because Cruise is absolutely committed to playing his part straight. Mangold and the actor must have both said, "the goal is for Roy to treat everything going on as if its just another day." No matter how absurd it gets, how far the action explodes around then, Cruise plays Roy like there's nothing weird going on. Totally unphased by it all. His performance is almost like that of a straight man to the over-the-top action going on around him. He adds to the humor because, for him, there is no humor. This is his life, and he's amazing at it.

And then he's dropped into the middle of a frothy romantic comedy. Cameron Diaz has a number of romantic comedies under her belt coming into this film, so she gets to be the one let us in and what this film is actually supposed to be. She's the single woman looking for love (that doesn't know it) when the perfect guy just shows up. Only that perfect guy is an international secret agent who kills twenty dudes before breakfast on the regular. He should be the worst guy for her, and everyone around her knows it... but it just works. That's part of the magic here.

Mangold really plays this film like a finely tuned instrument. If the tone were off, if the film leaned too hard on the serious action or the frothy romance it wouldn't work. Tonally this is a high wire act and yet the director pulls it off perfectly. This is a film that really shouldn't work and yet because of the actors along with Mangold's direction, it really does. The film hooks you in and keeps you glues to this misadventure from beginning to end. You can't look away because the film is having so much fun all the time.

With that said, there are a few small moments that don't work quite as well as they should. A late chase sequence, with Roy and June on a motorbike, riding through Pamplona, Spain, during the riding of the bulls looks pretty fake. Most of the time Cruise is doing his own stunts, but maybe because Diaz was here as well, or just because it was animals and there is no way to control that, it's obvious that stunt doubles and a lot of CGI was use. It doesn't look realistic and it was the first time I felt myself losing attention on the film.

Also, for all it's talk about Roy needing to deal with his double-crossing partner, Fitzgerald, that character never really comes into focus during the film. Hell, none of the villains do. The film tries to paint it like maybe Roy is the bad guy and he's on the run to steal the tech he was supposed to be protecting, and yet because Fitzgerald never really becomes a real character we never doubt he's the villain. A little more time filling in Fitzgerald's edges to maybe make him feel like a real character could have had us doubt Roy's motives, which in turn would have added some interest to the late film twists.

Still, these are minor flaws in an otherwise fun and enjoyable film. It's light, it's poppy, and it keeps you sucked in from beginning to end. It's everything you want from a spy-action-comedy-romance, which is totally a thing, we swear.