Cruise and Diaz Shine in Knight and Day

Reading the reviews about Knight and Day with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz left me with mixed feelings. Cruise excels at Mission Impossible type characters. Diaz can make ugly characters look good. The fact that the script went through multiple writers, no less than three title changes and a change in lead roles left me wondering what kind of shape it would be in.

Reading the L.A. Times review didn't help me in the decision making process. They called the movie "the world's first screwball- comedy, action-romance, Hitchcock-homage, family- drama paranoid- thriller -." So is the movie really, really good or does it stink to high heaven?

I love a well made movie. A movie where the actors turn their characters into believable people and the plot of the movie CANNOT be predicted. Let's face it, when you love movies and watch plenty of them, you soon come to recognize the well-used totally-predictable scenarios.

Could a script survive so much chaos and retain any elements worth watching? Could the reputations of Cruise and Diaz save a potential failure? I don't care how much money the studio spent on production. I do care about the lightness of my wallet after I pay for tickets, coke and popcorn, not to mention giving up approximately two hours of my time.

When I entered the theater, my only thought was escaping from the reality I'd endured all day. My choices were Killers, Knight and Day and Iron Man 2. Fear of the Knight and Day script led me to choose Killers. That decision lasted as long as it took the ticket clerk to tell me I had thirty minutes to kill before Killers started. So I bit the bullet and put down cash for Knight and Day.

Yes, this movie went all over the place. Comedy, danger, romance. It zigged, it zagged. The unexpected happened again and again. The action and flying bullets were a great antidote to my daily grind fatigue. The romantic elements would make any Avon editor proud. The comedy left me laughing so hard I almost spilled my popcorn.

Diaz is beautiful even when she's totally zany. Cruise totally nails the unconventional, handsome and very skilled Roy Miller character. I came out of the theater smiling and feeling so much better than when I went in. Knight and Day is well worth the time and money. It also defies description. One must see it to believe it.