James Mangold’s Knight and Day opened in U.S. theaters on June 23, 2010, sold as a globe-trotting action comedy with two of the biggest stars of the previous decade. Tom Cruise plays Roy Miller, a secret agent on the run from his own agency. Cameron Diaz plays June Havens, a classic car restorer pulled into his mess at an airport.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
A Cornfield, a Pontiac GTO, and a Battery Called the Zephyr
The plot is a stack of errands. June is flying home to Boston from Wichita with car parts when she bumps into Roy at the airport and gets moved to a later flight. CIA agent John Fitzgerald, played by Peter Sarsgaard, decides June must be working with Roy and puts her back on the plane. In the air, Roy takes down the passengers and crew, who turn out to be Fitzgerald’s agents, and crash-lands in a cornfield.
He drugs June. She wakes up at home, where her sister April, played by Maggie Grace, is preparing a wedding. April wants to sell their late father’s 1966 Pontiac GTO tri-power, the car June had planned to restore as a wedding gift.
Fitzgerald picks June up. Roy appears, kills a pile of agents in a highway chase, and the two are off. June runs to her ex-boyfriend Rodney, a firefighter played by Marc Blucas, and Roy shows up, pretends to take her hostage, and shoots Rodney to sell the act. The reason for all of it is a battery. Roy has the Zephyr, a perpetual energy battery, and he had been assigned to guard its inventor, Simon Feck, played by Paul Dano. Fitzgerald tried to steal the battery and framed Roy for it.
Casting That Took the Long Way Around
The film’s road to production was long. It sat in development under the title Wichita, with Adam Sandler offered a lead role. He declined, saying, “I just don’t see me with a gun.” The project moved from Revolution Studios to Sony Pictures, where it became Trouble Man, a romantic vehicle for Chris Tucker and Eva Mendes. Both dropped out. Diaz signed on at Sony, and Gerard Butler met with production about starring opposite her before taking the lead in The Bounty Hunter instead, opposite Jennifer Aniston.
Cruise was auditioning for parts in five films at the time, including Salt and The Tourist. He chose Knight and Day. The source notes he wanted to modify the role of the male lead with his own ideas.
The Zephyr Problem
A perpetual energy battery is a fine device to hang a chase on. In this telling, it never becomes a stake. The film treats it as a line of dialogue. When June and Roy reach Brooklyn and find Feck gone, they get a clue that he is in the Alps, and the movie moves on.
The cast around the leads is stacked. Viola Davis plays CIA Director Isabel George. Jordi Mollà plays Antonio Quintana, a Spanish arms dealer whose henchmen attack the pair in Brooklyn. Falk Hentschel plays Bernhard. Lennie Loftin plays Braces. Sarsgaard gets the most to work with as Fitzgerald. The script is by Patrick O’Neill, and Mangold is the director.
The Island, the Helicopter, and the Train in Austria
June gets drugged again and drifts in and out of consciousness as the two are captured and escape to Roy’s off-the-grid island. She takes a call from her sister and accidentally leads Quintana’s men to the hideout. They escape an unmanned aerial assault vehicle in a helicopter, and Roy knocks June out to get around her fear of flying in the tiny helicopter. She wakes on a train in Austria, where Roy has reunited with Feck.
Diaz is a comic performer, and the script keeps putting her under. The running gag about her losing consciousness is not a character trait; it is a way to skip the part where she would have to react.
The highway chase is the cleanest action sequence in the movie. The plane sequence is well built. But a chase is only as good as what is being chased and why, and Knight and Day never answers the second question.
A 1966 Pontiac and a Wedding Nobody Attends
The best thing in Knight and Day is the thing it keeps abandoning: the GTO. The source says the car belonged to their late father and that June planned to restore it as a wedding gift. The film sets that up and then drops it for a battery.
The second-best thing is the pairing itself. Cruise and Diaz had already worked together on Vanilla Sky in 2001. The tagline promises that “Every Hit Man Deserves a Second Shot!” That line is about Roy, the hit man in question, and the film is the second shot it advertises.
Key Facts
- Release: June 23, 2010, in the United States, by 20th Century Fox
- Runtime: 109 minutes
- Genre: Action, Comedy
- Director: James Mangold
- Worldwide gross: $262 million
- Metacritic aggregate: 46/100 (4.6/10)
- Hindi remake: Bang Bang!, starring Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif
What Knight and Day Gets Right, in Order
Ranked by what actually works:
- The Cruise-Diaz chemistry, which carries scenes the script does not.
- The 1966 Pontiac GTO tri-power, the only object in the film with a history.
- The highway chase, the cleanest action sequence in the movie.
- The plane crash-landing in the cornfield, which sets a tone the rest of the film cannot hold.
- The supporting cast, which is underused.
- The Zephyr, which is a premise, not a story.
Our Verdict
Knight and Day is a movie with a strong idea and a weak center, and the center is the script. The action is fine. The stars are better than fine. The problem is that no amount of charisma covers a film that keeps choosing the Zephyr over the GTO, the set piece over the scene, and the star’s idea of the character over the character.
The source reports mixed reviews, with praise for its action sequences and the performances of Cruise and Diaz, and criticism of its script. That is not a contradiction. It is a description of a movie that works in pieces and not as a whole.
What matters here is not that Knight and Day failed to be a great action comedy. Plenty of films do. What matters is that it had the pieces — Mangold, Cruise, Diaz, a dead father’s car, a wedding — and spent them on a battery. The 1966 Pontiac GTO tri-power is the only thing in this movie that feels like it belonged to someone. Everything else is inventory.
Metacritic score: 4.6 of 10 (46/100).
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