Knight And Day (12A)

IT begins so promisingly. Car restorer June Haver emerges from the toilet on her flight to find fellow passenger Roy Miller has killed everyone else on the plane, including both pilots.

From then on, Knight And Day makes as rapid and bumpy a descent as the aircraft.

Director James Mangold’s action romp wants to be like a Hitchcock thriller with quips but, after that intriguing set-up, fails to mine the plot for suspense, content to let stunt-packed scene after scene do the work.

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And then there’s Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, together again a decade after Vanilla Sky. He does his action man thing, she does her ditzy blonde thing.

Like everything else in the film, we’ve seen in all before.

The action whizzes around the US and Europe, with a detour to a desert island so Tom can show off his manly chest and Cameron can slip into a bikini.

If only the plot made any sense or we cared what happened to anyone. Miller is an agent that his bosses (led by Viola Davis) think has turned nasty. They spend an awful lot of time and energy trying to capture him, failing because they use the sort of gunmen who couldn’t hit an elephant at point blank range. Cruise, however, guns down everyone in sight with unerring accuracy (though in a bloodless, 12Acertificate kind of way).

There are chases and fights on planes, trains and roads. They’re slick and well-executed, even if a sequence in which the pair flee a load of bulls (or the script as I like to call it) on a motorbike seems to have been inserted purely so Cruise can show off his skills in the saddle with Diaz clinging on for dear life on the back.

Knight And Day also features one of the weakest villains I have seen in many a movie. Not only is the identity of the traitor obvious from the word go, but he’s not even an interesting baddie.