Latest Cruise Vehicle Falters At Box-Office by Paul Hansen
Latest Cruise Vehicle Falters At Box-Office
 New York, NY
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 by Paul Hansen
 
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Knight and Day, the latest Tom Cruise vehicle, apparently opened at below expectations grossing $20.5 dollars on its opening weekend.   The film came in third (behind Toy Story 3 and Grown Ups)  and is apparently the poorest opening for a Cruise film in 20 years.   The movie, which also stars Cameron Diaz, was directed by James Mangold whose other films include 3:10 to Yuma and Walk the Line.

In its ferocious pace from location to location, Knight and Day contains echoes of  Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.   The ostensible plot of the film centers around the capture of a battery  known as a “Zephyr,” which is a perpetual energy source.  Roy Miller (Cruise’s character)  is a former CIA agent who spends the bulk of the film tracking down the Zephyr while trying to outrun agents who think that he has gone rogue.  Diaz, a seemingly innocent bystander,  is ensnared in the plot when a flight she is sharing with Cruise is overtaken by agents attempting to capture him.     

As with many other current action films,  the  plot of Knight and Day serves as  a thin framework to justify a number of chase sequences.   Unfortunately, most of the action scenes in the film are not particularly memorable and could easily be interchanged in any number of other spy caper movies.  Another shortcoming of the film is the absence of development of any compelling supporting roles.  Viola Davis, as Cruise’s erstwhile CIA boss,  has gravitas but is not given sufficient screen time to form a fully rounded character.     Cruise and Cameron also do not have any significant chemistry (at least to this reviewer), which makes the lack of focus on any supporting actors seem all the more unfortunate.

As with many other spy films, Knight and Day has a number of tourist set locations, including Austria and Seville.   The film does not fully exploit the geographic beauty of these locations which is normally standard practice for travelogue pictures.  

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, Tony Sella, a co-president for marketing at 20th Century Fox, analyzed why Knight and Day’s opening did not perform to expectations. Among the possible factors include the movie’s confusing preview trailer, and a poster which featured neither of the two stars.   The lack of box-office excitement is also curious considering that the trailer for Knight and Day ran before showings of Avatar,  the  highest-grossing film of all time.      

It will be interesting to see what repercussions, if any, the box-office of Knight and Day will have at 20th Century Fox. The film reportedly cost $117 million and has a current world-wide gross of  $75 million according to the-numbers.com.   Two other summer Fox releases, The A-Team and Marmaduke,  have also apparently performed below expectations.
 


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Last updated  New York, NY 10.07.27  by Paul Hansen

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