Knight and Day

Once upon a time in Hollywood, a movie star called Tom Cruise was sacked. The box-office takings for his latest Mission Impossible action-adventure hadn't been sufficient to justify his high contractual fees, and he'd just made a very public fool of himself sofa-jumping on Oprah's TV chat show. So, maybe, Tom decided to make a movie sending up the action movie genre, and himself. It was called Knight and Day and starred him and another ageing headliner, Cameron Diaz.

She's ten years younger than Tom, but looked much older much of the time, which helped 1962-born Tom to continue twinkling his eyes like a teasing teen. His self-mockery even extended to letting himself be seen emerging from a tropical ocean a la James Bond with a big fish and a very podgy waist.

Cameron's face may have aged but her body still looked great in a bikini. Both of them could be forgiven for romping through the mildly bizarre scenario about a US secret agent and his accidental accomplice -- because they were clearly having fun performing a Mr and Mrs Smithy Brangelina act with nods in the direction of Arnie and Jamie Lee Curtis, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and other tongue-in-cheeky action pairings.

Written by Patrick O'Neill, a bit-part actor in a few 1990s movies, the Cruise vehicle features the all-suburban-American hero as a government agent framed for the theft of an inexhaustible battery newly invented by a young boffin (Paul Dano) who needs protecting from bad guys too. Bumping into mildly dizzy Diaz at an airport, en route to her sister's wedding, Cruise finds himself depending on her latent talents for action.

Her comic talents are pleasantly exploited by director James Mangold, best known for the Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line, who packages the light-weight entertainment with decorative explosions, chases and close-ups of Cruise's silent chuckling. Several US critics damned the movie with faint praise: it might be more acceptable as DVD entertainment, they moaned after their big-screen sightings. Any praise is better than none, Cruise might mutter with a smirk.

Any idea that Knight and Day might become a new franchise for them can probably be abandoned. It grossed less than US$80 million in North America. More important, Tom and Mission Impossible producers are a Hollywood item again, producing a new MI.