Knight and Day overview

The pretext for all the thunderous comings and goings in "Knight and Day" is a small battery, hardly larger than a D-cell, that the hero must keep out of the hands of various bad guys. It is not, we are told, "your average Duracell," but "the first perpetual energy source since the sun." The source of this movie's energy is near-perpetual desperation. You can see it in Tom Cruise's fixed grin, and in the mad proliferation of unspecial effects. You can feel it in the feverish pace, and in the stuttering style of an action adventure that wants to be seen as a gleeful send-up of "Mission Impossible," yet mires its star in hapless self-parody.
For years now, summer movies have been wearing their audiences down. With the spectacular exception of "Toy Story 3," this summer's studio releases have been so dispiriting that even critics who know better are blunting their barbs and giving trash a pass as harmless entertainment. I've done that too, on occasion; being a serial spoilsport isn't a lot of fun. Far from wearing me down, though, "Knight and Day" woke me up to just how awful some summer entertainments have become. It isn't that the film is harmful, except to moviegoers' wallets and movie lovers' morale, but that it is truly phenomenal for the purity of its incoherence.

The starting point of the story is a chance encounter between Mr. Cruise's Roy Miller, a secret agent on a mission more dangerous than he knows, and Cameron Diaz's June Havens, who restores old cars for a living. The starting point of the writers—there must have been a bunch, though Patrick O'Neill gets sole writer credit—was Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" with the genders reversed: June is the innocent, originally played by Cary Grant, who gets caught up in a succession of incomprehensible events. (Within the limits of the enterprise, Ms. Diaz manages to be likable, though the movie finally presses her into awfully foolish action-heroine service in the dubious tradition of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith.") But what was mysterious in the Hitchcock film is gibberish in this one, which was directed by James Mangold.

At least some of it was directed by Mr. Mangold. Much of it is the consequence of what I've come to think of as digital delirium, a state of being that prompts studios with deep pockets and shallow perspectives to believe that because something can be done digitally it should be done.

Almost anything can be done with these new techniques, and "Knight and Day" is here to prove it—an airliner's crash landing, which is absolutely devoid of any drama; an airborne motorcycle; a running of Pamplona's bulls; a relentless succession of ritual explosions, and a series of chases that fill the sky with a galaxy of spinning cars. These effects are familiar, of course, but no longer amusingly so, as they were in the digital era's early days. Now they're snorefully boring and cumulatively deadening because they owe no allegiance to the laws of physics, let alone to the dictates of effective drama. As big-budget special effects grow ever more ungrounded, the movies that rely on them are coming unmoored.