Big Picture Big Sound

Snooze Control

Long before he was a scary Scientologist, Tom Cruise was a movie star. He could race down the street without breaking a sweat, win over any woman with his game-show-host smile and truly rock a pair of shades. "Knight and Day" is his attempt to remind people that, even in his late-40s, he is still that guy. It's a practical career move, if only he picked something better than this asinine, action-adventure dud.

There is a ton of talent wasted in James Mangold's "Knight and Day," a movie that relies on heart-pounding sequences, collisions and high body counts to distract from Patrick O'Neill's flimsy script, which really doesn't make a lick of sense. Off the bat, there is a woefully-miscast Cameron Diaz as a love interest for Cruise; they have manufactured chemistry at its worst. She alternates between screeching, making googly eyes at him and looking confused -- it's a role better suited to someone like Jessica Alba, who can't do much else. Even more tragic is seeing Peter Sarsgaard, Viola Davis and Paul Dano stuck in such unmeaty roles.

In one of the film's few amusing scenes, secret agent man Roy (Cruise) takes out a small plane full of people who want him dead, leaving only June (Diaz), as she got on the flight accidentally. Plus he thinks she's kinda cute. She soon realizes she's dealing with a dangerous man, but he claims he can protect her, so they become fugitives trying to outrun a corrupt federal agent (Sarsgaard) and make sure a deadly battery doesn't get into the wrong hands.

Stupid plot -- you were warned. "Knight and Day" is a star vehicle for Cruise, and while it's an awful movie, it does show that he's still charismatic and athletic. (He did all of his own crazy stunts and lived to share that information.) But surely he can find a better project to show off in than "Knight and Day," which is similar to Tony Gilroy's "Duplicity" in its cloying pointlessness and flair for repetition. A movie with so many explosions should never be so boring.

"Knight and Day" is a ludicrous, large-scale failure that doesn't deserve all the money it's bound to make. Let's hope the next installment of "Mission Impossible," due out in 2011, will be more worthy of Cruise's charms.