Knight and Day

Knight and Day could have been a hit in the 1990s, but today this movie feels like something of which Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a fresh remake (and not just because the main couple has sex in it). James Mangold manages the dynamics and action well and knows how to work with actors, but he is too old-fashioned for this genre. (14/07/2010)

Wonderful nonsense. As if you would get onto a plane and fly back to the nineties where a car blows up when you shoot it in the gas tank, tough guys are quick with snappy lines and scantily clad blondes wink at you with dry Martinis in their hands. Tom Cruise doesn’t age, looks the same and is doing the same crazy things as he was twenty years ago. Mangold handles the directing pretty well (it has that pleasant old-school feeling that it should), but the too obviously digital effects spoil the overall effect. Sometimes I think that it’s a shame that Greengrass didn’t get his hands on this. And John Powell is a guarantee of good music. A pleasant time-out. (18/10/2010)

Undemanding entertainment that relies on Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. Cruise has played a decent number of similar invulnerable and indestructible agents, and here he can take advantage of his acting routine and audience expectations. Similarly, Cameron Diaz has played countless similar naive characters in her career. My problem with these types of films is that they are desperately predictable and have a terribly formulaic and simple script. In the airplane scene, Cruise takes down ten opponents without breaking a sweat, but the audience knows very well that if the plane were fully occupied and he faced 150 enemy agents, the outcome would inevitably be the same. A few decent lines and two or three interesting scenes where the story momentarily deviates from the template, like the scene where our hero shoots his enemy in the leg, can't save it. Knight and Day is exactly the kind of film where a fraction of a second after a new character appears, you can identify them as the main villain, even though this "surprise" is saved for the end by the screenwriter. Overall impression: 40%. (03/01/2011)

These two are absolutely wrong for each other, plus I find her extremely unlikable (but honestly I wasn't paying attention, so I didn't look at her cute little face that much). He's also not high on my list of cute guys. But as a movie where you don't need an IQ higher than 70, it held up beautifully. I had fun, it flew by, it dispensed with the emotional garbage. I'd say the film is a decent representative in its category – I don't want to think too much, I want to be entertained and have a good meal. (04/01/2014)

It’s all boom, bang, and zoom, and a middle-aged Barbie and a middle-aged Ken are all mwah, mwah. And all this happens quite stylishly, in 90s trappings and with the excellent idea of watching everything from June's point of view and not Roy's. It's just a shame about the great imbalance between the scenes and about Cruise. It’s not that he's not bad, but Ben Stiller would have been better for the role. (07/08/2010)