Cruising for a bruising? … Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz filming Knight and Day in Seville earlier this month. Photograph: Javier Barbancho/Reuters
Take a look at any “most anticipated movies of 2010″ list online and you’ll see a familiar collection of sequels and remakes and adaptations. But there’s one big summer movie that the list-makers seem to have ignored so far – the Tom Cruise/Cameron Diaz action comedy Knight & Day.
This wouldn’t hold happened a few years ago. Earlier in the decade, the hype surrounding a high-kicking blockbuster starring Minority Report’s Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz from Charlie’s Angels would have been building since the moment it started filming. As it is, the past three days have seen a poster and a teaser trailer launched to almost no fanfare whatsoever.
You don’t poverty to be a capacity to see why Tom Cruise’s hoard has fallen in recent years – Scientology, couch-jumping and films relative to one-eyed Nazis trying to thump up Hitler with bits of luggage have all helped to transform him from the biggest star in the earth to a whooping, air-punching joke.
But Cameron Diaz hasn’t fared so well-head either. There’s been an unsettling over-reliance adhering Shrek and its infinite spin-offs (including next year’s Shrek Forever After, Shrek makes up about a third of her IMDb projects since 2001) peppered with gloopily sententious Oscar-bait such as My Sister’s Keeper, generic comedies that she should have grown out of long ago (see What Happens in Vegas) and gormless thrillers like The Box. She necessarily a hit just as badly as Cruise does.
So both Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz have a lot at risk here. And although the signs aren’t all positive – Knight & Day sounds like the title of a bad 1980s BBC sitcom, the teaser poster makes it look like Diaz has a penis, and the first-choice stars were apparently Chris Rock and Eva Mendez – it probably constitutes the nearest effects to a unscathed bet for them.
It’s a no-brainer for Tom Cruise. His extended cameo in Tropic Thunder proved that people don’t find him quite as unbearable when he’s being lighthearted – presumably inasmuch as he’s easier to keen to when his boggle-eyed raving is intentional and not side of a leaked Scientology video about terraqueous globe government. Plus, the trailer suggests that he gets to save the world at the end, which quite clearly caters to his Napoleon complex. And it could potentially play to Cameron Diaz’s strengths as well – it allows her the freedom to be at her funny and unselfconscious best, without the downside of having to star opposite Ashton Kutcher.
However, let’s not rate too low Tom Cruise’s capacity to balls things up yet. Right things being so Knight & Day looks like every inessential but fun crowd-pleaser that, if nothing else, could help to resolidify the box-office certificates of its leads. But that’s only so extensive as Tom Cruise decides not to attend the premiere in a burning tank, or dissipate five hours shouting, “No, YOU’RE the man!” at every single person who enters his eyeline, or fake-laugh his way through a billion eerie television interviews prior to its release. It’s all his to suffer by comparison, basically.
