Knight & Day (2010, USA)

Knight & Day is a lot of things – a throwback romance-action film, an opportunity for Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz to show off their dental work, a chance for Paul Dano to reflect on the poor career choices he’s made since There Will Be Blood – but did it have to be so creepy, too? Here’s the thing that got under my skin – a major plot device in Knight & Day has Cruise’s rogue spy knocking Diaz’s high-strung bystander out every fifteen minutes or so. I mean, at least he does it with drugs and not his fists, but come on, people – am I the only one who finds this fairly disturbing and not a little bit rape-y?

In order to better illustrate my point, let’s take a great example of a romance-action film, one that Knight & Day so badly wishes it could be – Romancing the Stone. Did the main characters fight? Yep. Did it seem like Michael Douglas’s character occasionally wanted to knock Kathleen Turner out? Sure. Did he actually do this at every conceivable turn, to better drag her around the globe with him? Not so much. In order to have real chemistry between your leads, both of them need to be conscious the majority of the time.

Turner’s Joan Wilder was as much an active part of Stone as Douglas’s Jack T. Colton was (in fact, I’m pretty sure her character name has better recognition factor than his, and despite what the opening credits say, she’s totally the main character), and she helped get the two of them out of as many scrapes as he did. That’s one of the things that made Stone so fun. And I wouldn’t blame the stray little girl (ahem) who would occasionally imagine herself as Joan Wilder. Sure, she’s a little high-maintenance, but the lady has guts, a brain, and ends up being so cool that a guy drives a boat through the middle of the Upper East Side for her. All I remember about Diaz’s character was those teeth.