IT IS hard to tell who’s too old for whom: the script for the stale slice-of-cake spy movie Knight and Day or the actors reciting it. The theory must have been: If the plot arcs, the characters don’t have to, even if the plot couldn’t fill a coke spoon. Boston garage owner June (Cameron Diaz) encounters mischievous secret agent Roy (Tom Cruise) in the Wichita airport. Soon the two are flying a jet into a cornfield, after which FBI agents pursue them from all directions. They head to the Caribbean, then to Salzburg.
Diaz is repeatedly knocked out by Cruise with some sort of secret anesthesia, so she can keep waking up looking tousled and post-coital. Cruise hide his own crow’s feet behind sunglasses. Meanwhile, the really nothing villain (Jordi Mollà) pursues the customary widget, a battery called “The Zephyr” built by alterna-scientist Paul Dano.
One moment of passing cuteness has Diaz blabbing away because of truth serum (it’s a slight recycle of a Woody Allen bit in Zelig). But the filmmaker’s faith in cheap-looking green screen sinks the film—except in rare instances, you can’t even really see the locations, which are one dim or foggy computer fabrication after another. The nadir is a replica of an NYC freeway when there’s not even a chase going on. Director James Mangold (3:10 to Yuma) shows his leaden touch for gunfights. The key to the Bond movies, Roald Dahl claimed, was that you could kill as many people as you liked as long as you didn’t do it sadistically. Mangold tries to revive the formula—making a winking shoot-’em-up among a slamdance of SUVs—but he seems to have seized the wrong end of the 1960s: Knight and Day is more redolent of the spy capers filmed when everyone was sick to death of making them, let alone watching them. The chirpy Hall and Oates on the soundtrack only adds to the air of the synthetic; the two stars are trying to coast when they’re on flat dreary ground.