{"id":10469,"date":"2010-06-27T12:11:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-27T04:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=10469"},"modified":"2018-03-14T10:46:57","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T02:46:57","slug":"knight-and-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2010\/06\/27\/knight-and-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Knight and Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"blog-knighday-01\" Knight and Day <\/em><\/strong>(2010) – AMC Loews Harvard Square. No American experience is complete also without catching a film at the local theatre. There\u2019s been movie trailers running of Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz\u2019s new action-comedy for a month or so now \u2013 the Best store at Compass Point has a big LCD TV at the entrance showing its trailer \u2013 so after work on Thursday evening I headed to the theatre at Harvard Square to get a ticket for it.<\/p>\n

In the film: Cruise plays a super agent, Roy Miller, and Diaz, June Havens, a slightly ditzy-headed, coming to middle-age woman whose profession involves restoring antique cars. Her hormones go ringing when she bumps into Cruise, seemingly accidentally at the domestic airport. What starts looking like a typical boy-meets girl on airplane turns upside down when Cruise kills everyone on board, and proceeds to crash the plane.<\/p>\n

A lot of action-comedies are oriented around the cop-buddies subgenre, so it\u2019s refreshing to see a film like Knight and Day<\/em> return to the likes of True Lies<\/em>. The super secret agent, alongside a female partner who has no clue early on what he really does, and when she finds herself dodging bullets, flying cars, and explosions and high-octane action, the comedy follows. The film has been compared to Mr. and Mrs. Smith<\/em> for its cute couple interaction dialog when bullets are flying, but the comedic stuff in Knight and Day<\/em> is more pronounced.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s especially worked well is that Cruise is tremendously likable in this film. He\u2019s super proficient as an super-agent\/assassin on the run, but it\u2019s equally supported by that toothy and boyish grin of his as he tries to calm a near hysterical June who has no comprehension why she\u2019s constantly getting shot at.<\/p>\n

Several of the action scenes are pretty inventive, including one involving Roy on a motobike getting chased by bulls and the aforementioned airplane fight, and others approaching James Bond in the camp factor, e.g. a scene involving a remote-controlled drone on his personal hideout. The action scenes don\u2019t drag too. They\u2019re compact, and not filmed, thankfully, with the steroid-induced monkey cinematography that\u2019s typical of Michael Bay\u2019s films. There\u2019s also a subplot that\u2019s mined ruthlessly and to varying effect: specifically one about June constantly getting drugged into unconsciousness for her own good and it\u2019s hilarious, but when it occurs again at the film\u2019s end, it\u2019s feels tacky.<\/p>\n

The film smartly keeps its attention on its two main leads – Cruise and Diaz – and they play off each other well, and the sexual tension is deliberately kept low-key until the climatic last act when June gets injected with truth serum and has a line about sex that will put you in stitches of laughter. There\u2019re supporting actors of course, several of which I immediately recognized: Peter Sarsgaard playing an almost similar role to Flight Plan<\/em> (starring Jodie Foster from 5 years ago), and Dale Dye in a rare acting and speaking role \u2013 he\u2019s well-known in films but normally as a technical advisor.<\/p>\n

A good portion of the film was shot in Boston too, and it was a real kick for me as a visitor to recognize the different locations throughout.<\/p>\n

Knight and Day<\/em> is by no means perfect however. There are huge plot holes that make zero sense and you won\u2019t even need to look very hard to see them. But that I could live with. More seriously is that while the film is enjoyable for the first 100 minutes, it\u2019s shockingly silly and outright absurd in the last 10. The ending, starting from how the antagonist is disposed all the way to the end credits is so lackadaisical it\u2019s really jarring.<\/p>\n

Still, the film was worth the USD10 admission ticket. For those of us in Singapore catching the film, you can always leave early 10 minutes early when the film is at its high point.:)<\/p>\n

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Knight and Day (2010) – AMC Loews Harvard Square. No American experience is complete also without catching a film at the local theatre. There\u2019s been movie trailers running of Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz\u2019s new action-comedy for a month or<\/p>\n

Read More Knight and Day<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment","category-traveling","wpcat-10-id","wpcat-17-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}