Review: Knight and Day (2010)
Note: This post contains a portion of a review written for CaryCitizen. To read the full review, click here.
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.