Tom Cruise & Cameron Diaz

You go to some movies and all you want is a couple of hours well-killed. That's all I wanted from "Knight and Day."

I had hopes, not because its premise is particularly fresh -- he's a secret agent; she doesn't know whether to trust him or not -- but because of the director, working this time with a first-time screenwriter. An outsize comedy thriller, it stars Tom Cruise in his first summer action vehicle since "Mission: Impossible III" four years ago and Cameron Diaz as the one perpetually getting drugged and whisked off to another exotic locale. The director is James Mangold, whose resume includes "Heavy," "Walk the Line" and the remake -- bombastic, but well-acted -- of "3:10 to Yuma."

Nothing on that list suggests Mangold would be ideal for an international-man-of-mystery bash. Nothing suggests he'd be wrong for it, either. A director and a couple of movie stars, however, can go only so far on fumes, and screenwriter Patrick O'Neill galumphs through the paces while an unGODly amount of computer-generated effects work flies around the actors' heads. Stampeding bulls in Spain, cars flipping end over end: It's all here, and often in flames. But when the action's pitched at such a ridiculous level of hyperbole, the laughs barely have enough oxygen to qualify as wheezes.

Cruise plays a comic variation on Ethan Hunt, his "Mission: Impossible" sprinter. CIA spook Roy Miller (Cruise) meets June Havens (Diaz, stuck inside a ninny's role) at the Wichita airport; she's boarding the plane back east with carry-ons loaded with auto parts for her body-shop business. Onboard the suspiciously empty plane, the flirting begins, and she sneaks off to the biffy to check her makeup. In a flash Miller kills everybody onboard because they're assassins trying to kill him, and then he crash-lands the plane in a cornfield.

"Knight and Day" exists for its set pieces, such as Cruise atop a speeding car, driven by Diaz ("You've got skills!" he says, admiringly), while he slaughters "bad" guys and "worse" guys with two machine guns at once. The narrative involves the scramble after a tiny whatzit called "the zephyr," invented by a young genius (Paul Dano) who only wanted to provide humankind with "the first perpetual energy source since the sun." Not counting Cruise's smile.

From Boston to Agent Miller's secluded Caribbean island to Austria to Spain and back again. Mangold jams his camera alarmingly close to his stars' faces, which gives the frenzied action sequences more a sense of vertigo than immediacy. The script, which could be called "unfilmable" except for the fact that Mangold filmed it, zags and zigs along, the banter trapped in a wit-free zone. "Let's hope that 'Knight and Day' shows Hollywood that it doesn't take James Cameron and 3-D to sell an original," the ordinarily sensible Indiewire.com columnist Anne Thompson recently wrote. I suppose it depends on your definition of "original." A 21st century "Charade" pumped up on all the wrong steroids, "Knight and Day" may well suffice for audiences desperate for the bankable paradox known as the predictable surprise, and willing to overlook a galumphing mediocrity in order to concentrate on matters of dentistry.

 

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"Knight and Day" Movie Trailer

 

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MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of action violence throughout, and brief strong language).

Running time: 1:50.

Cast: Tom Cruise (Roy Miller); Cameron Diaz (June Havens); Peter Sarsgaard (Fitzgerald); Jordi Molla (Antonio); Director George (Viola Davis); Paul Dano (Simon Feck).

Credits: Directed by James Mangold; written by Patrick O'Neill; produced by Cathy Konrad, Steve Pink and Todd Garner. A Twentieth Century Fox release.