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If there’s one thing that has significantly changed the landscape of escapist filmmaking, it’s the move away from star-driven vehicles to franchise driven ones.  Special effects, easily branded imagery and familiar rhythms are the elements that sell an audience on a franchise. Often there is a lack of energy and unpredictability that comes as a result of this trade-off. Filmmakers aren’t eager to break that contract with the viewer that promises what they are going to get is what they paid to see. Unfortunately, for the movie going audience, what we often get are pictures where the leads could be interchangeable.

Even in Avatar, which falls outside of my complaints above, Jake Sully could have been played by literally anybody. There was a time, even not so awfully long ago, when popcorn films were structured around actors and, more specifically, movie stars. Many years ago it was Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart standing in as their own special effects and providing emotional pyrotechnics. Now, in James Mangold’s effortlessly fun new summer fling, Knight and Day, a newly recharged Tom Cruise and a playful Cameron Diaz remind how much a good set of actors can really bring to the table.

The film they are in is completely ridiculous, although significantly less so than the battiness of The A-Team or the solemn absurdity of Robin Hood. With Cruise as Roy Miller, an agent who’s maybe gone round the bend, and Diaz as the hapless young woman who falls into his orbit. Knight opens in an airport, moves onto a doomed airplane, careens down a large stretch of highway, and barrels through Austria on a train. Towards the end, all of the main players, incljuding the villainous Fitzgerald (Peter Skarsgaard), are chasingeach other through Spain, in search of  a powerful device known mysteriously as the Zephyr. As is wont to happen in movies like this one, Roy and June are forced to flee on a motorcycle, with Diaz wrapped firmly around Cruise, as they careeen in between the running of the bulls, with the bovine brutes trampling up and over speeding cars. I would have rolled my eyes, but by this point we’ve already watched Roy fall off a motorcycle and onto the hood of a vehicle, spraying machine gun fire down the freeway as other cars fly through air past his head.

All of the action scenes have a kind of gee-whiz, tongue-in-cheek quality to them. We aren’t supposed to take them seriously or have them jar the back of our skull loose. They have been so skillfully constructed to reveal the seams, that we can only conclude–following the smirking lead of Cruise–that we are meant to be amused by them, and to laugh at the over-the-top nature of it all. Either way, it doesn’t matter much. Unlike the crunch and munch of Michael Bay’s insanely loud and depressingly stupid blockbusters, James Mangold’s movie pops, snaps and zings it’s way to the finish line, like a pinball machine with real human beings at the center.

As I said up front, this movie stands or falls based on what Cruise and Diaz can bring to the table. Here, they bring alot. They make Roy and June not deep people, but realistic enough that we can connect with them, and once that happens, everything including the big explosions has a little more bite and kick to it.

 Tom Cruise comes out of the gate smirking here, and every nod of the head, half-smile, or sideways glance has been calibrated to remind his fans of an image of the Cruiser we haven’t seen in awhile. This isn’t the odd, egomaniacal persona that alienated fans a few years ago, but is much closer to the more self confident, but not self-absorbed, Cruise that did Mission Impossible. Diaz has a really appealing and straightforward quality that shines in the character of June. Together, they are both made better and they sell the angle that these two characters would be drawn to one another, even as the rest of the world seems intent on killing them.

A modern action movie might not require us to believe in any kind of a bond between characters who are on the run and are required by the script to face off with the villain at the end, and achieve a happy resolution. In the end, though, I’m thankful that Knight and Day does. It’s the best big budget, live action film to heat the theaters so far this summer and I hope it finds the audience it deserves.

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