Knight & Day

Speaking of Tom Cruise, and his 25 best movies...

...The Lovely Steph Leann and I just got home from dinner, as we met up with MZ and her reality show.  We came back to The Cabana, and both of us just collapsed into our comfy leather couches. Flipped on the television, and scrolled through the endless parade of channels, all showing the same program:  "nothing on".   And what's on CMT?  "Days of Thunder".  And its just as bad as I remember it being. 

Anyway, as promised, here's Tom Cruise's latest...

Saturday morning, I flipped open the newspaper and scanned the movies.  Found out that The Rave Motion Picture Theater at Patton Creek was doing a sneak preview of "Knight and Day", the latest flick with Tom Cruise, also starring Cameron Diaz.  Cruise and Diaz were together one time before, and that was in "Vanilla Sky", which would be Tom Cruise's worst movie ever, were it not for the existance of "Eyes Wide Shut".

Sent The Lovely Steph Leann a text, asked her if she wanted to go and she gave an enthusiastic "YES!"   We had both been seeing the previews to this one for a month or two now, and had added it to our list of films for the summer we were intending on seeing... so I got off work, headed home, we left a few hours later for dinner at Dale's Southern Grill, and then around 7 walked into a half-packed theater.  By the 730 showtime, the theater was almost completely full, albeit it was one of the smaller theaters.



The movie starts, and right away we are sucked into something that we'd been missing for a while, as mentioned in my previous post... we saw Fun Tom Cruise.

"Knight and Day" is a film with Cruise as a secret agent who has gone rogue, stealing something that is not only wanted by the government, but also terrorists.  He runs into Diaz, though from the beginning of the film you can tell that he's been scoping her out for whatever his purposes are.  Its a typical "things are not what they seem" movie, but really, you kinda know pretty quickly what things are.  Its not a particularly hard-to-predict kind of film and much of the action is formula driven and cliches...

...however comma...

..this film was a winner for me based on the strength of Fun Tom Cruise and Quirky Cameron Diaz.  Cam is not an actress that should ever try drama, she works better when she can be silly, stupid and let her freak flag fly... see "There's Something About Mary" or "Charlie's Angel".

They have good chemistry, and Fun Tom Cruise looks like he's actually having a great time making this movie.  Cameron seems as if she's having a ball just being there, being relevant again (did you see "My Sister's Keeper"?  Exactly.)  The script is a little hokey, but The Lovely Steph Leann and I couldn't help but laugh through much of the movie.  Yes, yes, its a fantastical premise, and some of the stuff that happens makes you think, "Uh... yeah... right..." but go with it.

Now, the critics aren't kind to this one.  Its averaging a "C" score, or perhaps 2 out of 4 stars in some reviews, and its opening day (Wednesday, June 22nd) didn't do it much good either--it only came up with about $3.8 million, compared with the $13.4 million that Toy Story 3 did on the same day.  (source: Box Office Mojo).

Anyway, this kind of reminds me of The A-Team, in that its just a fun popcorn movie.  Don't take it seriously, catch it on a matinee, laugh and enjoy yourself and welcome back Fun Tom Cruise.