Tom Cruise has been virtually undeniable for the last 10 years (if you ignore The Mummy), with Top Gun: Maverick saving movies after the COVID-19 lockdowns and Mission: Impossible — Final Reckoning (supposedly) wrapping up a truly incredible series of movies. But he carried a lot of baggage as a movie star before that, mostly because of his dedication to Scientology and a bizarre appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show during the press tour for Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds in 2005. That led to a low period for his career, culminating in a clearly desperate attempt to resurrect his old action movie success with the ill-conceived Knight and Day — a forgotten flop that’s now a streaming hit on Prime Video.
The most notable movie from Cruise’s dark period was Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder, which not only wasn’t sold on Cruise’s appearance at all but buried him under prosthetics and makeup specifically so he could play a very un-Cruise-like character. Coming just a few years after he jumped on Oprah’s couch, Tropic Thunder was Cruise trying to prove that he’s “in on the joke” of being a weirdo, or perhaps an attempt to reveal that we all still had some fondness for him. Knight and Day, meanwhile, is extremely Cruise-like: It’s sold entirely on his name and the name of his co-star (Cameron Diaz), and he once again gets to play a charming, handsome action hero.
Why Was ‘Knight and Day’ the End of an Era for Tom Cruise?
Knight and Day, directed by Logan’s James Mangold, is Mission: Impossible as a romantic comedy, and audiences and critics really could not have cared less about it. Oh sure, it made $260 million worldwide, but it made approximately zero cultural impact and was a total non-factor in resurrecting Cruise’s image post-Oprah’s couch. And the clearest indicator of that is the fact that his very next movie was Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, the movie that revived that series and actually put Cruise back on the path to being a beloved movie star again. Even if Knight and Day wasn’t a complete disaster, the message it sent was clear: Just make a real Mission: Impossible movie. That’s what people like.
As for Knight and Day itself, it stars Diaz as a regular woman who crosses paths with Cruise’s character (Matthew Knight, which is where we get half of the title) at an airport. After getting mistaken for a spy or something by the CIA, she accidentally gets involved in an attempt to assassinate Knight — who is some kind of spy or something — and then has to join him on a globe-trotting mission to save the world. There are stunts and chases and quips, plus twists on twists on twists, and it all follows the same kind of formula you’ve come to expect from a movie like this that stars Tom Cruise. It also features Peter Sarsgaard, Viola Davis, Paul Dano, and Gal Gadot.
Is it good? No, but it’s important as a historical document because it’s the last movie he made before going back to Mission: Impossible and almost exclusively focusing on the kinds of movies he knows people like. Now, thanks to Prime Video, Tom Cruise scholars can check it out and learn a little something about how he went from an actor everybody liked, to an actor nobody liked, to being an actor that most people seem to like. Or, who knows, maybe he’ll do Knight and Day 2 now that Cameron Diaz has come out of retirement.
- Release Date
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June 23, 2010
- Runtime
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109 Minutes
- Writers
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Patrick O’Neill
