Movie Review: Knight & Day - A Very Entertaining B+

Okay here we go. A brief review of the film Knight & Day starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. As you may or may not know it's opening weekend performance has been slammed by the major media and Tom Cruise shows he's still able to make some media types froth at the mouth. Regardless of what you may read, Knight and Day is an entertaining film - more entertaining than the depressathon Toy Story 3 (D+) or the dismal remake of The Karate Kid.

Yet both those movies did much larger box office...so what's the deal? The deal is the trillion dollar pharmaceutical industry, which spends more advertising dollars with television, cable, internet and radio than any advertising Knight & Day will generate. That's the deal. Movie reviews are bought and paid for in advance. The tentacles of the sponsors found in films (You know the twenty second scene looking at a billboard of the Marlboro Man) are long and each film represents X number of advertising dollars from sponsors. The review comes out according to the vested financial interest. Toy Story 3 is a horrible movie and yet the over the top reviews were already bought and paid for long before any critic saw it. That's the way it goes in Hollywood. Capitalism isn't always pretty and sometimes one has to see behind the curtains to educate oneself. That way you become a better educated capitalist yourself.

I tend to dislike such imbalances and so I use this non-filtered, non bought off platform to lift the curtains and bring some measure of balance. While the companies that want to hook you and millions others on a plethora of drugs you take for the rest of your life are out to weaken the star and earning power of a financial threat to their industry, others are looking out for you and are trying to make you aware of the dangers of ALL drugs and drug addiction. While Cruise is a Scientologist and carries lots of baggage because of it - his anti-pharmaceutical interview is astoundingly sane and rational good advice that most doctors will never give you. While a tiny number of physicians and research scientists go into practice to answer a higher calling, 99 percent plus are in it for the money.

So Knight & Day is fighting a media that's bought off to destroy Cruise and anyone sharing a movie with him (in this case Cameron Diaz). So this is why I'm here plugging Knight & Day. I'm not a big fan of wasting time watching films or television. If you must watch something - I'd prefer it be something that entertains and makes you leave the theatre feeling upbeat.

Cameron Diaz does a great job in this film. Tom Cruise does well and he really steps back and lets Cameron shine. This is her film and she's great. Cameron Diaz has an internal sunshine that catapulted her to fame not long after her first modeling cover for Seventeen magazine back in the late eighties, and in this film it is really given a chance to bathe the viewer. She's far better in this than in There's Something About Mary or The Mask. For anyone wanting a real honest-to-goodness entertaining summer movie - perhaps to see with family/friends on the 4th of July - Knight and Day is the ticket.

B+