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You’re a 30-something woman flying home to your sister’s wedding, and a cute guy you’ve just met assassinates all of the other passengers on your plane, as well as the pilots, and crashes it into a cornfield.
Shortly thereafter, this charmer kidnaps you — to “protect” you from the bad guys, he says — wounding your ex-boyfriend in the process.
Telling you that other people will claim he’s a mentally unbalanced rogue CIA agent, your new friend with the killer smile repeatedly drugs and undresses you while dragging you around the world, where he kills many dozens of armed pursuers while neither of you suffers barely a scratch.
MORE ON ‘KNIGHT AND DAY’ ON THE POST’S MOVIES BLOG
Do you (a) try to escape at every possible opportunity or (b) help this guy while quickly falling in love with him?
After a few moments of half-hearted resistance, the woman in the overproduced, alleged action comedy “Knight and Day” takes the latter route.
And it’s for no other plausible reason than he’s Tom Cruise, she’s Cameron Diaz and this is a big, dumb summer movie with no apparent ambition other than plugging a hole in a studio’s schedule because its faded star happened to be available for a few weeks.
Am I being too tough? Sure, comic action thrillers — even great ones like “North by Northwest” and “Charade,” both fumblingly referenced here by director James Mangold (“Walk the Line”), not to mention “True Lies” — require a certain suspension of disbelief.
“Knight and Day,” though, is one of those movies that requires you to accept that every single time a character is presented with a choice, he or she will make the worst and most inexplicable one.
This would possibly be more forgivable if the stars were given actual characters to play, rather than being forced to coast on screen personas (he’s cocky, she’s ditzy) that seem increasingly dated for Cruise, who will turn 48 next month, and Diaz, who will be 38 the following month.
It would also help if they were given some dialogue that was actually funny, or at least more clever than the lines provided to Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl in the distressingly similar “Killers” from earlier this month.
It also wouldn’t hurt if a few surprises were sprinkled into an ultra-predictable plot that seems to have been cranked out by a computer screenwriting program without significant human input.
It’s not as if the director actually made interesting use of extensive location shooting in places like Austria, Spain and Bermuda, which are deployed so unimaginatively that the studio could have saved a bundle and shot the whole thing in Vancouver, like “The A-Team” did.
Instead, we get endless close-ups of Cruise’s grin in a winking performance that seems to be nudging us in the ribs and reminding us roughly every 30 seconds that “Hey, look, I’m spoofing my testosterone-charged persona and my real-life reputation as a guy a few cards short of a full deck.”
Diaz is more flatteringly photographed than in some of her more recent films, but there’s nothing more than a token effort on her part at making her character’s motivations plausible. Basically she either screams or looks at her “Vanilla Sky” co-star from 2001 adoringly.
Even the more technically proficient actors on hand — like Peter Sarsgaard and Viola Davis (as CIA operatives) and Jordi Molla (as a Spanish arms dealer) — don’t make much of an impression in cardboard roles.
While he gets minimal assistance from the script, Paul Dano does manage a few bemused moments as an eccentric physicist whose invention, a high-tech battery, is supposed to be propelling the plot.
Those moments are more than welcome in a movie like “Knight and Day,” where even a herd of stampeding bulls, real and CGI, manages to seem utterly boring.
I can only assume the film ratings board was lulled into such a stupor watching this movie that they didn’t notice this PG-13 movie has a body count far exceeding many that receive R ratings. Not that you feel Tom or Cameron are in any actual danger for one millionth of a second.
lou@lumenick.com