He Said: Knight & Day/Eclipse

By Jamie D. Ruccio

July 7, 2010

I've had dates like this.

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So, remember what I wrote in the last installment of He Said/She Said about boring, commercial, Hollywood movies killing my movie loving self? I think it's happened. I was on life support already. But I think I've actually movie died. Arrange for the funeral, put my movie loving body in a pine box and toss dirt on it. I think I no longer have the desire to seek out good movies. And I blame the kill shot on Knight and Day.

It's not that Knight and Day is a bad movie. It's just sort of there. It is exactly like every bland, high fructose, syrupy, generic summer action offering. The story of Knight and Day is less about the movie and more about its development history, disappointing box office returns and what that means to the further career of Tom Cruise. It's also an interesting and surprisingly open look into movie marketing with co-president of marketing for Fox (one of the distributors) Tony Sella doing a PR post-mortem on the marketing strategy.

In its long development history, Knight and Day has gone through 12 writers, three titles (formerly Wichita and Trouble Man) and has had the likes of Adam Sandler, Chris Tucker and Gerard Butler all at one time associated in some form with the movie. And it suffers from all of this as it very much has the feel of a movie that was well done long before.




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Knight and Day is apparently about international spy Roy Miller (Tom Cruise), who encounters June Havens (Cameron Diaz) at the airport. They literally bump into one another as they wait for the same flight. Once on the sparsely populated flight, June decides to take a chance and engage Roy in conversation. But before she makes her final moves she goes to the bathroom to freshen up. Then, in one of the funnier scenes in the movie, Roy is attacked by every passenger and crew member, who all turn out to be fellow spies bent on killing him. Emerging from the bathroom, every other person on the flight, save for Roy, appears to be sleeping...until the plane lurches to the side to reveal that Roy has dispatched everyone, including the pilots. Roy then manages to crash land the plane in a corn field, drug June and then return her home.

June wakes in her own bed and proceeds to assist her sister with her wedding. This is interrupted by federal agents who take her away and promise to take her to a safe location, something Roy warned her evil agents would do. However, before they are allowed to harm her she is rescued by Roy himself. Unsure of which side is really interested in her safety, she escapes from Roy and contacts an ex-boyfriend, the firefighter (he has a name but really, does it matter?). Roy again "kidnaps" June. They then go to retrieve a genius scientist, who has invented a world-changing machine that Roy claims to be responsible for protecting.


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