Knight and Day

The new Tom Cruise vehicle mixes the screwball brand of romantic comedy into a high-octane spy-thriller plot and comes up with a hit-and-miss hybrid—a screwball thriller, let’s say, but one that’s screwier than it is thrilling. Roy Miller (Cruise) is some kind of over-the-top super agent whose off-the-wall machinations drag exuberantly guileless June (Cameron Diaz) into an outlandishly complicated bit of intrigue over a futuristic gadget called the Zephyr. June, who restores classic cars, is in way over her head, but she’s also getting hooked, partly on the adventure of it and partly on Roy. Predictably, but much delayed, the feeling proves mutual. It helps, in a somewhat perverse way, that Cruise and Diaz are, in their separately charismatic ways, getting creepier with age—crazy is as crazy does in this flick, and crazy is the only chance such a far-fetched extravaganza has for survival as entertainment. The Cruise-Diaz pairing works well enough, but too much of this jokey caper plays like half-baked self parody—Mission Disposable Part 2 perhaps. Paul Dano is good as Simon Feck, the feckless genius who invented the Zephyr. Viola Davis and Peter Sarsgaard are functionally authoritative in routine suspense-film roles. Feather River Cinemas, Paradise Cinema 7 and Tinseltown. Rated PG-13