Knight and Day... A Hit & A Miss!

Knight and Day is a fun filled journey into the unreal, ordained with quite a few potholes. These when ignored results in a great movie experience. I suggest that you leave your grey cells to hibernate for 109 minutes and enjoy the rollercoaster.


Why the crew preferred the title rather than calling it ‘June & Roy” is an intriguing thought, maybe best left for later. Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) easily stands out as the ‘Atlas’ who carries this movie, all the way through. Miller’s role definition is done before your seat gets warm – he is a very charming yet mysterious someone surely associated with either the FBI or CIA types. The way he visually stalks to find his prey before spotting the innocent Ms. Diaz, does add a dark thought or two, if you went in without knowing what to expect.

Talking about ‘charm’ – that is something Mr. Cruise is born with and generally doesn’t have to try very hard to usher in but being on the extremely wrong side of 40, actually shows in this comic action caper. He looks old and tired, either there wasn’t enough money left to hire a good make up artist or it was a case of plain old wrinkles… but it shows! June Havens (Cameron Diaz) saves the day for Mr. Cruise in the looks department, she looks pretty anemic, pretty similar to how Julia Roberts did in Ocean’s Twelve but at least the latter had a recent maternity to point fingers at… Ms. Diaz looks so haggard that some of her action stunts look beyond belief. At places where ‘looking sexy’ was the intent, she ends up looking like someone who needs to make sleep rather than love.

Anyway so much so for reviewing their looks, now let’s relish the action. The locales, stunts, crashes, chases, hand to hand combat and application of technology makes it worth the trip. The first sequence inside a commercial jet, which strangely starts out as a Airbus A320 and crashes as a Boeing 747, is pretty fast paced and funny and sets the tone for the next 90 swashbuckling minutes.

June Havens is a girl next door; carrying spares for an old car that she wants to finish building (her father, now dead, used to) to gift it to her sister April Havens – much too deep, emotional, sensitive and mushy for a action movie one would think… but you’ll love it when she finishes building the car and you get to see a lot of it at in the last 10 minutes. Her quite boring, normal, no boyfriend, car building life gets intertwined with that of the main protagonist, Mr. Cruise – a true action hero, who knows only to save the day (and earth) from marauding meanies, resulting in a simple yet interesting script.

Every possible moving machine is put to good use - there are crashing planes, murders on trains, car chases, bike escapes, helicopters, boats and if that was not enough you have enraged bulls running amok. All this because our dear Mr. Cruise is supposedly a secret agent who has turned rogue and has kidnapped the nerdy inventor Simon Feck (Paul Dano) who’s claim to fame is inventing a battery like object, called the zephyr which is allegedly a never ending source of energy. I agree that one needs to be much more than a genius, almost God like, to have created something that important but I had only one question for Simon Feck’s character – Can’t you F@*#ing shave???

Agent Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard) and Director George (Viola Davis) are after the rogue Roy… they pluck Ms. June and prove it to her that Roy is bad news and she does fall into their trap, albeit briefly. Anyway, poetic justice is meted out and as even my 3 year old toddler would have predicted, Peter’s the bad guy, Tom’s the protector and Director George, well… is merely a fool! Now if Agent Fitzgerald was the only bad guy, it wouldn’t be fun and what could a rogue CIA field agent actually achieve without a larger shark aiding him?

Lo and behold… Mr. Antonio (Jordi Molla) the Spanish arms dealer arrives and he is the big bad wolf who, as always, dreams of world domination! So we are whizzed through Florida, Massachusetts, Austria, Spain and a very beautiful tropical island inhabited only by Mr. Cruise, in ‘Tom & Jerry’ like fashion. However powerful and wily the bad guys are they are always outwitted by the good guys. In their numerous attempts to kill Roy, June and Simon – their own numbers do get tragically reduced as Mr. Cruise can kill as smoothly as he can kiss.

Anyway, let’s cut directly to the last few minutes… What Mr. Simon Feck actually invented is only an useless over heating battery, which explodes! With a bit more intensity than your run of the mill Duracell… intensity enough to blow up the villain’s (Agent Fitzgerald) get away plane but one is not as saddened as one should be when the nerdy genius (idiot) is shot in the process. So in essence, numerous people and bystanders and shot, maimed and/or killed by either our cute (and aging) couple or the bad guys for something that was utterly useless in the first place.

Many segments of the movie do give you the feeling that the unit was running out of money as they lack the necessary depth of explanation or character build up. The audience is expected to use their imagination to fill these gaps which is very strange for a movie directed by James Mangold, the very genius who gave us fantastic flicks including the Oscar nominated ‘3:10 to Yuma’ and ‘Walk the Line’ which won Reese Witherspoon her academy award.

Or maybe it’s the bad editing; Quincy Gunderson and Michael McCusker must have done their deed after a night out drinking lots of bad whisky. It surely does show symptoms of someone working through a massive hangover. A lot of the action sequences end up being quirky and quite too much to palate BUT who cares… my grey cells were in deep slumber to analyse and sift between the logical and the crazy.

I guzzled the movie down, as it was served and frankly I was left with a nice after taste… I liked it and, sensing from the murmurs of the crowd leaving the theatre… everyone else also did.

It will not get into any top10’s or into any action classics list but will remain as that ‘smile’ whenever you think of it.

Farewell to you

I don't want to say goodbye to you,

but still know you should go.

This is a time of sadness, a time of joy,
a time to say farewell and goodbye.

A time of despair, for you and me
but let’s see it from the other side.

Let’s put our emotions to rest
as they lose out to the test of time

Time and money are the real world
where emotions are a game and gain...fame.

Take care my friend and get through to last
as moments fly by and our time wears thin

I say, with a heavy heart, a tearful eye
a drooping brow, yet a smiling face

Farewell... farewell to you.

- Vinay Kalyan Parakala

Tonight

I want to be among the stars tonight

I know it's too far from you...
To hear you smile,
To feel you talk,
To see your eyes...

I wish I were among the stars tonight
Maybe you'll walk down the lane
like we've done a thousand times
and look up at the sky
and smile at me...

That'll do for a lifetime
my love…for my lifetime.
A smile will do if it's from you.
I want to be amongst the stars tonight,
It's cold and it's lonely…
But your smile will do.

I wish I were amongst the stars tonight.

- Vinay Kalyan Parakala