Film Review: Knight and Day

June 28, 2010 | Story by: admin | Categories: Film

By Andrew Johnson for CaryCitizen

Note: This review contains minor spoilers.

If this year’s crop of movies is any indication, Americans are looking for more criminal activity in their relationships. 

This March saw the release of both The Bounty Hunter, in which a fugitive recovery agent targets his ex-wife, and Date Night, in which Steve Carrell and Tina Fey played a married couple accidentally thrown into a mob conspiracy. Next, audiences were subjected to the Ashton Kutcher-headlined Killers about a suburban housewife who realizes her husband is a former government hitman.

And now Hollywood has provided us with yet another story about a couple forced to confront their relationship issues while surviving a plethora of explosions, gunfights and car chases.  Like Mr. and Mrs. Smith in 2005, Knight and Day attempts to use the action genre as a lens to explore relationship issues and gender roles.  Unfortunately, it becomes bogged down in action in its second half at the expense of emotional and thematic depth.

(Random side note: it also has the worst title in recent memory.   Not only does the “Day” have nothing to do with the film, but there are also no scenes of scenes of jousting, swordplay or Tom Cruise in a giant suit of armor.  I suspect any of those elements would have made for a far more entertaining film.)

The plot follows June Havens, a car enthusiast who inadvertently becomes tangled up in the life of Roy Miller, a rogue CIA agent who has stolen a perpetual energy battery called The Zephyr.  It’s a spy thriller with the central conceit of a romantic comedy: an unlikely couple forced together through unusual circumstances.

Cameron Diaz plays the straight woman to Tom Cruise’s eccentric secret agent, and their chemistry is strong enough to overshadow most of the plotholes and narrative inconsistencies.  Films like The Box and The Holiday have proven Diaz does have serious acting chops, and she handles herself well despite a script that requires little of her beyond reacting to… well, everything.

In misogynistic fashion typical of most action films, most of her time is spent running, screaming, or looking confused while Cruise does all the heavy lifting.  His portrayal of Roy Miller is the backbone of the film, with a pitch-perfect blend of manic energy and deadpan punchlines; think Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt on acid.  This performance, along with that of producer Les Grossman in 2008’s Tropic Thunder, indicates that Cruise has reached a point in his career where he’s willing to take a step back and poke fun at himself.  He’s clearly having a good time here, and his enthusiasm seeps through every frame.

It’s an extreme performance of an extreme character.  Roy Miller is the poster boy for male fantasy.  Not only is he witty enough to crack one-liners in a gunfight, but he can leap on top of moving vehicles and hold his breath for extended periods of time without breaking a sweat.  He’s always cool under pressure and meticulous in appearance – he’ll kill you in an instant and look good doing it.

It’s the classic bad boy stereotype: suave enough that women want to be with him, and macho enough that men want to be him.  Roy Miller isn’t human; he’s a fever dream of pure testosterone.  No explanation is given for why he’s capable of such superhuman feats beyond the implicit, “Because he can.”  He is the embodiment of pop culture masculinity, and it’s no wonder his sanity is frequently called into question – is there anything further removed from reality than the idealized gender roles of modern Hollywood blockbusters?  In the world of Knight & Day, women are clueless and easily wooed by violence, and the best man is the one with the quickest draw.  It’s old-fashioned movie philandry at its most basic level, with the hapless damsel in need of rescue by the conquering (read: violent) hero.

Interestingly enough, this presentation of archetypes in Knight & Day is so extreme and tongue-in-cheek that there’s a fascinating layer of subtext running through the first two-thirds of the film, as if the writers realize the absurdity of the gender stereotypes they’re working with and are intentionally trying to critique them.  It seems fitting, for example, that the primary conflict of the film involves a perpetual energy battery called The Zephyr.  The Zephyr was invented by a guy who has barely finished puberty, Simon Feck (note how the surname is an informal substitute for another four-letter word), and is frequently described in terms that could just as easily refer to male sexual potency:

Miller: It’s high output.  Never runs out.
June: What do you mean, never?
Miller: That little thing there is the first perpetual energy source since the sun.
June: So what, your flashlight never runs out of juice?
Miller: It can power a lot more than a flashlight, June.
June: Really?  How much more?
Miller: A small city.  Large submarine.  <suggestive pause>  It’s big. The guy who invented it is barely out of high school.
[emphasis added]

The Zephyr is Miller’s driving force, the object for which he is capable of effortlessly mowing down waves of bad guys while simultaneously courting June.  No wonder so many people are after him for it – in many ways, it symbolizes the raw power that fuels his status as invincible action hero, hot to the touch and highly unstable.

The film is at its best when it’s taking the time to explore these themes amidst the jokes and the explosions, but gradually loses focus as things progress.  By the end of the second act the narrative is strictly paint-by-numbers, complete with predictable double-crosses and cardboard villains.  The moral grays of Miller’s persona are largely ignored in favor of solidifying him as the simple Good Guy that modern audiences can easily digest.

What starts out as an intriguing exploration of gender roles and how mediums like film define them (not to mention why we even watch movies in the first place) becomes yet another tried-and-true caveman fable in which the Suave, Sophisticated Male must conquer the competing Big, Bad Males and woo the Weak, Scared Female.  Knight and Day has a promising start, but is ultimately just another example of how it’s easier for studios to follow formula than to risk originality or, God forbid, actually try to say something concrete about our social concepts and institutions.

One key scene finds Miller confronting Rodney, June’s firefighter ex-boyfriend.  Rodney is a truer-to-life depiction of positive masculinity, courageous enough to run into a burning building and genuinely concerned about June’s well-being.  Yet by the end of his meeting with Roy, he’s been shot in the leg.  “It’s gonna be better for you.  It’s all good,” Roy quips.  “Might even get a promotion.”

In this thematically fascinating scene, the average Joe is literally crippled by pop culture machismo and is persuaded that it’s a good thing.  I can’t think of a better metaphor for how the fabrication of gender roles by mass media can ironically end up emasculating those it aims to satisfy, yet still leave them clamoring for more.  More blood, more explosions, more dead bodies.  That’s the rallying cry of audiences today, as we buy into the myth that true heroes are not defined by their good deeds, but by the pile of bodies they leave behind.  Knight and Day knows this, and is brave enough to critique this assumption for over half its running time before ultimately falling victim to the same big celluloid lie.

Andrew Johnson is the host of MovieChatter, a weekly film discussion podcast headquartered in North Carolina.  He also occasionally blogs about film at The Kuleshov Effect.  Of all the opinions out there about the current state of cinema, he swears that his are the right ones.