When June Havens (Cameron Diaz) bumps into Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) at the airport on the way to her sister’s wedding she thinks she may have met the man of her dreams. Roy is charming, funny and good looking all in one package. But he is also a spy who has gone rogue from his organisation and is on the run. Which means that June is now smack in the middle of a spy game of cat and mouse when she wants to be preparing to be a bridesmaid!

When Knight and Day released in 2010 I was more than a little disappointed with the outcome. After all this was an action movie starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz who at the time were probably the biggest stars in the world with the biggest smiles in the world. Surely they could land an action film with a strong lean towards humour? But revisiting it in 2025 I still stand by my original opinion. This is an incredibly mediocre movie that only really gets by because of the smiles of its stars which could power the battery that is the film’s McGuffin!

The film starts strong. We have the meet cute in the airport and an action sequence set on an airplane that sets the tone. Roy is an infallible superspy who is always supremely chipper about every situation no matter how dire. It feels almost like a Twilight Zone version of his Ethan Hunt character in Mission: Impossible but with zero introspection or self doubt. June on the other hand is perpetually trying to keep up with what is happening to her. She is not ditzy per say, there is just a lot being thrown at her that she is constantly trying to comprehend the insanity of it all.

The main tenet of the movie is fascinating and I really want to love it. A superspy who is phased by nothing and can achieve everything having a whirlwind romance with a woman who is trying to catch up so that she can play the game as well. A slightly off kilter comedic tilt summed up by the best line in the film where Roy fakes a hostage situation with June and announces, “Nobody follow us or I’ll kill myself, then her.” Something that you actually believe he could do based on what you have seen to that point. It should by North by Northwest meets Mission: Impossible. But aside from the repartee between Cruise and Diaz everything else falls flat.

The action sequences themselves feel on rails and mostly CGI. The motorcycle chase sequence featuring the bulls in Seville looks pretty terrible in terms of those different elements being sewn together. And that feeling of a lack of danger or intensity applies to all of the action where you can see the joins between the stunt teams, the special effects and the editing. It is certainly something unusual to see with a Cruise film as he has pushed for more and more realism as his career has progressed.

The plotline that follows the spy agency that Roy has gone rogue from feels lazy and uninspired. Viola Davis and Peter Sarsgaard playing fairly generic and straight agency figures who could have come from any action movie feel drab in the face of the quirky nature of the Roy/June storyline.

And the other smaller plotlines fall by the wayside just as easily. Paul Dano plays an eccentric engineer who has created a battery that requires no power source that is the McGuffin everyone is chasing/protecting. Gal Gadot pops up in a single scene as a buyer for a criminal organisation and Marc Blucas plays an ex-boyfriend of June’s in a plotline that feels like it has been reduced a great deal in the editing room.

Director James Mangold has some highs and lows in his output and this is definitely one of his lesser features. The star power of Diaz and Cruise is simply not enough to make up for all of the other failings.