What Went Wrong: Knight and Day
By Shalimar Sahota
April 14, 2011
After a safe house shootout in Brooklyn, June is drugged and around a minute later, she’s on a tropical island. From this point on the film has lost it. Since explanations aren’t the strong point here, drugging June (with a made-up substance Roy refers to as Brotine-Zero) and causing her to blackout is used and abused as a lazy plot device to move from one set piece to the next. At first it’s forgivable, as Roy does it to get June back to her home safely, but it’s shocking to see this executed more than once (June is knocked out a total of three times). It’s almost as if the realization of making a summer blockbuster means that this shouldn’t matter, so the film decides to frivolously take advantage of this. It comes across as a bad attempt to super glue whatever good bits were left over by other writers, and it shows, with the pace slowed down in a latter half that’s suddenly devoid of humor.
For an action comedy blockbuster, Knight and Day appeared to be tailored more towards women. It’s told from the perspective of June, who is essentially the main character, and is in almost every scene (Diaz has more screen time than Cruise). We’re also supposed to believe that she’s an auto mechanic, but it seems wasteful giving her a skill that serves no purpose in the film (maybe it did in a former draft). Most of the time we know as much as she does, as the film plays out almost every woman’s dream fantasy, with June going on an adventure and different locations with a spy who happens to look a lot like Tom Cruise.
When the film was being advertised on TV in the UK, I recall most of the positive review quotes coming from women’s magazines! This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but then you have Mangold admitting that the film is, “essentially a love story.” Diaz said in an interview with Empire magazine, “We wanted the romance to be front and centre, because this is really a love story about these two people. In a way, what they’re going through is a metaphor for falling in love.” So there you have it. It’s not even an action comedy; it’s a love story. Promoting the film this way, and having it told from June’s perspective, might have brought in the women, but it could have done just as much harm by turning off the men.
I viewed Knight and Day a week after it opened. While it was nice to see an original idea released amid numerous franchise films, it didn’t help that the film was so mediocre. As already noted with the TV spots, audiences probably didn’t know what they were getting. It doesn’t help when the film itself starts as a frantic action comedy, but soon isn’t so sure what it wants to be. The characters jump to different locations and the focus shifts entirely during a third act where June is trying to find the man of her dreams. Plot details are spoken haphazardly in the hope that audiences are still clued in.
Working from a script that no longer resembles what was originally put on the page, with numerous writers and rewrites, is part of the problem (ten writers, and this was the best they could come up with?). But because Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are involved, Fox threw over $100 million at it and hoped for the best. International grosses pulled the film out of the rubble, but this could have (and should have) been so much more.
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