Thursday Night at the Movies - Knight and Day

Trailers for the movies Killers with Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl and Knight and Day with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz started showing at about the same time. Both seemed to be humorous action-adventure flics with virtually the same plot line. A beautiful woman (Heigl/Diaz) meets a handsome mysterious stranger (Kutcher/Cruise). People start shooting at them. The woman is frightened but the man is competent. The woman gets over her fear and even joins in the mayhem. Both movies looked like a lot of fun and we had planned to see both.The reviews for Killers were not good. So bad in fact (our local paper gave it one star out of 4) that we decided not to see it. But the reviews for Knight and Day were good (3 stars). And it was good.

Diaz plays June Havens, an auto mechanic (really) who specializes in restoring vintage cars. She's in Wichita retrieving parts for a project. Cruise plays Roy Miller, a secret agent, who may or may not have gone bad. It's a standard caper movie but the action sequences are exciting and funny and the location shooting is gorgeous.

Roy has the MacGuffin and and uses June to get it past security at the airport. The scene where a TSA agent is pulling various car parts from her luggage is pretty good. The MacGuffin is a battery, about the size of a c-cell which can power a small city and it's barely socially competent inventor.

The movie is a series of set pieces where Roy is trying to keep the battery/inventor from various bad guys while trying to protect June. Bullets are flying, cars are screeching, airplanes are crashing, but Roy is unfailing polite to June (and others) and almost never ruffled. June, in constant panic in the beginning, gradually learns how to keep her head while the madness is going on all around her.

If you've seen any of the trailers and liked what you saw, then you'll like the movie. There is a lot of violence but it is all of the 1st-person-shooter video game sort. There is good chemistry between Diaz and Cruise but the director mainly keeps it chaste.