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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Knight And Day: Just When You Thought It Couldn't Get Worse

I can only imagine that somebody in the 20th Century Fox marketing department is either a massive fan of movie blogs where people like me find things to moan about in crappy marketing efforts, or the Knight And Day campaign is just one titanic joke and it will all turn out to be a hilarious post-modern wheeze concocted by weed-addled sixth-formers as part of their A Level in Ironic Stupidity.

I mean sweet zombie Jesus, will you look at this:

Here's how it appears this poster must have come about:

1. A photograph was taken of two models adopting a ludicrous near-pornographic pose that nobody would ever find themselves in, even if one was an ass-kicking secret agent and the other a double-jointed gymnast with no concept of how to hold a handgun.

2. A mentally impaired llama was told to put on a blindfold and a pair of boxing gloves and photoshop the faces of two of Hollywood's biggest film stars onto the models' heads, but to do it so obviously badly that it looks like a horny badger has tried to have sex with the computer's mouse while it was doing it.

3. After that somebody who's paid more money than you or I could ever dream of decided to add some kind of inexplicable splodge in the background that makes it look like the leading lady has just shat out the entire menu of an Indian restaurant.

Bob's your uncle, a new poster is stillborn.

Given the embarrassingly woeful 'viral' videos on YouTube (here and here, though you have been warned) and the terminally tedious interviews that have already been used to promote Knight And Day, this poster just seems like another sterling attempt to keep potential audiences away. Amazingly, despite all these efforts, I know I'll still be handing over hard-earned cash to see it. I'm masochistic like that.

Anyway, I apologise if your eyeballs have run screaming from their sockets after being raped by that calamity. This might make things a bit better:

Ah, the soothing effect of a nice bit of monochrome Clooney.

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