Knight And Day

The ineptly designed posters, embarrassingly abysmal viral videos and turgid press interviews farted out to promote Knight And Day have long been a mystery, apparently cunningly crafted to keep as many people away as possible. However, having now seen the film, it's clear what they were up to.

What we have witnessed is a textbook exercise in expectation-lowering, to the point where the inevitably average end result is a considerable improvement on the craptaculous cascade of cabbages the world expected. It's a bit like being phoned up at work by someone telling you your entire house has been demolished by a meteor, only to rush home and feel relief that at least the shed's still standing.

Let's not fanny about: Knight And Day is not a great film. All the money has been spent on the stars, and director James Mangold spends so much time on lingering close-ups to prove that it really is Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz that you eventually start to realise how old Tom's looking, and ooh dear I hope he doesn't put his back out making Mission: Impossible 4. Meanwhile genuine talents like Peter Sarsgaard and Paul Dano are left twiddling their thumbs in case they overshadow the Tom 'n' Cam Show.

Early dubious claims that Knight And Day was some kind of Hitchcockian romp are flimsily backed up by the fact that there's a scene on a train, a chase across some European rooftops and a MacGuffin. Well, The A-Team has a tall building in it but that doesn't make it Vertigo.

In its defence, the unspectacular and unoriginal set-pieces are at least shot and edited so that it's possible to work out what's going on, which is a bonus these days, the score is jazzy and interesting for the first half before it descends into bog-standard lowest common denominator tuneage and Tom does at least look back at an explosion on one occasion, which as we all know is against all accepted action movie rules:

Knight And Day's problem is that it's just so ordinary, with nothing new to add to the genre and nothing to elevate it above any other summer movie from the last fifteen years. As for the title, it's almost completely meaningless. You may as well name a film blog The Incredible Suit and then make it neither incredible nor in any way sartorial. And that would just be stupid.

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