With Tom your entertainment value is up here, without him it's down here…

KNIGHT AND DAY

In KNIGHT AND DAY Tom Cruise is Roy, who may or may not be a demented superspy gone rogue, and who drags innocent bystander June, played by Cameron Diaz, around the world with him in a car chasing, gun fighting, plane crashing adventure. Apparently it all has something to do with weapons dealers and a new energy source and the scientist kid who invented it.

I wasn’t gonna bother with a review for this film because it really doesn’t merit one. This ain’t INCEPTION or TOY STORY 3. Both of those have far more weight and meaning in their first few seconds than KNIGHT AND DAY can muster in its entire 107 minutes. That by itself is not a criticism. I have nothing against vacuous movies that only set out to entertain on a purely surface level. Nothing wrong with that at all. Some of my favourite films do that. The problem is that this latest effort from Mr Mad Sofa Jumper…I mean Tom Cruise, though a reasonably enjoyable action comedy romance thingy, quickly starts fading from your mind as soon as the credits begin to roll. It is pure formula fluff. It is lightweight almost to the point of being thin air. It is silly yet tries to inject a bit of seriousness here and there. It really shouldn't have.

With KNIGHT AND DAY you can tell they were trying to go for the whole screwball comedy/romance thing – a kind of throwback to the old 30’s/40’s films that might then have starred Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn – only dressed up now as a big budget summer actioner. However it doesn’t really work. The characters are too thin and the jokes just aren’t that funny, smirksome is about all that can be managed. Good ol’ Tom, (I don’t care what anyone says, I love the guy) he does his best and he is a lot of fun to watch. But the material doesn’t really serve him. A smarter, wittier script should have been the basis here. As his partner in screen time, Cameron Diaz does what she is supposed to do – look cute and flustered, be a bit ditsy before getting it together by films end. But she isn’t especially good or funny, just adequate. The rest of the cast doesn’t make much of an impact either. As soon as you see Peter Sarsgaard’s name you know he is gonna be the bad guy. And he plays it just as you’d expect - slimy and obvious. Arguably the best of the supporting bunch is one-time-Buffy-boyfriend Riley Finn aka Marc Blucas who gives a nicely innocent, goofy turn as Rodney, June’s Fireman ex-boyfriend.

But, look, James Cameron already made this movie sixteen years ago. A big budget star driven screwball comedy/action/romance adventure. It was called TRUE LIES. And it was and still is frikking amazing!

KNIGHT AND DAY is nowhere near to amazing, even though it's directed by James Mangold, a man who has made a load of films I love including GIRL, INTERRUPTED, IDENTITY, WALK THE LINE and 3:10 TO YUMA. To be fair he does a decent enough job here. The film certainly has energy and pace and he directs the plentiful action with that same energy and pace as well as a strong sense of timing and rhythm, though none of it ever reaches the wicked highs Mr Cameron managed sixteen years ago. But comparing anyone to James Cameron in the action stakes is kinda unfair. No, the main problem with the action stuff in KNIGHT AND DAY is that Mangold is let down badly by some truly awful digital effects. Effects that if Cameron saw them he’d immediately beat the shit out of the FX supervisor before firing the entire company. I saw background projection straight out of an 80’s Bond film along with some hugely unconvincing CGI vehicles and CGI assisted stunts. Plus it doesn’t help that the script is paper-thin (not a pun) and the characters likewise, so we aren’t really invested in them when they are running and jumping and shooting. But, to his credit, Mangold keeps it kinetic and keeps it fun so he hasn’t shamed himself and I’m still a fan.

Crap! This review is about double the length I was originally intending and way longer than this film deserves. So I’m gonna end it right after this next bit.

KNIGHT AND DAY is pure fluff but rises just a couple of notches above average thanks mainly to the efforts of Mr Cruise and Mr Mangold. However it won’t prove to be a stand out effort on either of their future CVs. File and forget. 2.5 (out of 5)

End of line.

Nobody loses with The Losers

The Losers

Wow! So…um…The A-Team has a lot to live up to this summer.

The Losers is an action movie based on a comic book from DC/Vertigo about a band of special forces guys who get framed on a job they were doing. Left for dead in Central America, they eventually get the chance to return Stateside in order to enact their revenge and clear their names. So far so very A-Team. Now I’ve not read the original comic this movie was based on so I have no idea how much of a rip off…I mean homage to the much loved eighties TV series it is. All I do know is that, as a movie, The Losers rocks! The story of The Losers is pure nonsense. But it doesn’t matter. The script by Peter (The Rundown, Hancock) Berg and James (Zodiac) Vanderbilt is fun, tight, fast-paced, witty, and sharp as sharp can be. The direction by Sylvian White is stylish mixing glossy, fast cut MTV/Michael Bay-isms with a hefty dose of Peter Berg’s own hand held grit. But neither styles overplay themselves, they just mix wonderfully and give The Losers its own distinctive comic book look and feel.

But above all else it’s the terrific cast that truly makes this film. Right from the get go each and every one of them radiates effortless charisma and charm. They all seem immensely comfortable playing off each other, like riffing jazz musicians in one of the coolest bands you’ve ever heard. But at the core of it all are four great performances. The team’s leader is the tough, laconic and hugely charismatic Jeffrey Dean Morgan. You might remember him as Edward ‘The Comedian’ Blake in Watchmen. Dean Morgan is like a more world weary Robert Downey Jr minus the smartass. And spookily he looks a lot like him too, only a beefier and more rumpled version. His gruff sparring with the also great Idris Elba is a wonderful character cornerstone to the movie. Chris Evans plays the teams tech guy and the main source of comic relief. Evans once again shows why he is a big star just waiting to go stratospheric. He brims with charm and humour, but, as he proved with the likes of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, he is also a genuinely strong actor. Plus he isn’t afraid to take the piss out of himself as he does to great effect here. His character in The Losers is a bit of dork who can’t talk to women and is mostly unaware of his own dorkishness. The sequence where he infiltrates a tech company to steal info from a computer is hilarious. I never laughed so hard at a Journey song. Luckily for us Chris has been cast as Captain America in Marvel’s upcoming movie adaptation of its legendary patriotic hero, which means he will also play the dual lead with Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man in Joss Whedon’s movie of The Avengers. Wow! My head nearly exploded just attempting to contain the enormous geeky coolness of that sentence. And then there is Zoe Saldana in the femme fatale role. Ah, Zoe. I’m so in love with this girl it ain’t funny. Last year with Star Trek and Avatar she proved she was a wonderful actress with so much natural poise and feeling to her performances. Here she is just as good, although her character doesn’t have as much depth to work with as in those previous two films. But she is still an intense presence who looks stunning and who moves with a seductive feline grace. Maybe it’s the trained ballet dancer in her but she moves like nobody else on screen. You can tell Zoe from only her silhouette, purely from the way she moves. Also, in this movie, she is in what is probably THE greatest single shot of the year: stood tall and poised atop a cargo container while firing a rocket launcher from the hip. In slow motion. As sexy and lethal as all hell. But for all good heroes you have to have a good villain. And with The Losers we do get a good villain, a very good one. Which brings me to the fourth top-notch performance in the movie: Jason Patric as the vicious, sarcastic Max. He’s coldly evil, casually shooting a girl dead just because she accidentally moved the parasol she held over his head to let in some sun. And then, later on, he is bitingly sarcastic to his main henchman in what are some wonderfully amusing put-downs. It is that nasty sarcasm that does the trick. You rarely get that in films - especially American films. But Patric does it so well here. He really is a cold, snide, ruthless, ghastly monster. And what more could you want from a comic book bad guy?

So, in the end, despite the visual razzmatazz and the very cool action, it is the cast and the characters of The Losers that stays with you. It has that feeling of a perfect group coming together to make magic happen. It’s like watching Firefly/Serenity, or Predator, or the new Trek movie. Every role has been perfectly defined, cast and played, with the group chemistry being immediate and evident. Together this band of brothers (and sister) light up the screen, and by films end you just wanna be able to hang out with them and have a few beers and a few laughs. I loved The Losers. A lot. I had a huge grin on my face all the way through (when I wasn’t drooling over Zoe). It entertained me in a big way. And I can’t wait to see it again. 4.5/5

The Losers trailer