*** (M)
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Director: James Mangold.
Cast: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Paul Dano, Mark Blucas.
SPY movies haven't quite been the same since the Bourne movies came along.
Even James Bond sat up and took notice, but Knight & Day is an adventure movie that pretends Jason Bourne never woke up with amnesia.
Instead it revels in being a fluffy throwback to the early 007 days (the Connery and Moore years) but without the gadgets, or even the action-adventures of the '80s that thrived on the debonair-hero-and-hapless-heroine-along-for-the-ride formula of Raiders Of The Lost Ark or Romancing The Stone.
Not that it's anywhere near as good as those films it's referencing (and it does reference them - there's even a reverse Dr No moment where Tom Cruise comes out of the water, not Ursula Andress).
This is a piece of throw-away fluff, albeit an enjoyable piece of fluff, that never takes itself too seriously as Cruise's possibly duplicitous secret agent leads an assortment of bad guys around the globe, all the while protecting a perpetual motion battery (the film's MacGuffin) and damsel in distress Diaz.
Knight & Day maneuvres from almost amusing banter moments between Diaz and Cruise to big action set-pieces, which mostly work. The best is the first, in which Cruise's Roy Miller takes out a plane-full of baddies using little more than a cushion and a seatbelt.
Director James Mangold goes to great lengths to show that Cruise is in fact doing a lot of the stunts, using close-ups and not hiding his face in the clinch, but in this day and age of CG trickery you can't really be sure, except to say you can spot a lot of the CG in this film - it's surprisingly average, particularly a sequence where the heroes escape on motorbike while pursued by the villains and a herd of digitised bulls.
The saving graces of this film are the light tone, the cool action sequences and Diaz, whose presence and comedic timing is a breath of fresh air.
Cruise, on the other hand, is becoming harder to separate from his off-screen celebrity. Most people think of him as that batty Scientologist and his cool, calm and collected spy is meant to be utterly charming but seems a little smug (or is that just me?).
Either way, his presence is not enough to derail Knight & Day, which for all its action movie cliches (particularly bad guys who shoot worse than stormtroopers) manages to be a neat throwback to a less-serious type of spy adventure.