Another quick early morning cinema visit to VinCom Towers in Hanoi, this time to see the new Tom Cruise / Cameron Diaz action/comedy.
“Nobody follow us or I kill myself and then her!”
Cruise has certainly become known more for his action films in recent years with the Mission Impossible franchise topping that list. Diaz tends to veer more towards comedy. Knight and Day is a wonderful blend of the two that works extremely well with a good story, witty script and ridiculous over-the-top set pieces (although too many are shown in the trailer).
June Havens (Diaz) is a “nobody” travelling back from a shopping trip in Wichita for her sister’s wedding. Roy Miller (Cruise) is an unbalanced rogue secret agent. Fate sees them share a flight where Miller reveals his true identity at which point Havens is caught up in a plot involving a stolen perpetual energy source.
It’s not quite up there on the silly scale with the recent The A-Team but it’s not far behind. It’s nice seeing Cruise playing a fairly off-kilter character and, in my opinion, this is one of Diaz’ best performances. Despite looking sexy, I always found her Charlie’s Angels character annoyingly dizzy.
As with most action films these days, a lot of CGI is used to make the stunts and set pieces far bigger than they should be. A part of me is growing to love this silliness, but another still harks back for the days of the early Bond films where everything was built, destroyed, fallen off and so forth by actual people.
Still, worth the 90,000d I paid for the ticket and the early rise to see the 8:45am performance.
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Well, often in the earlier bond movies, they blew stuff up in scale model form, or back-projected much more interesting backgrounds.
I don’t think there’ve been any Bond movies with NO sfx.
But I know what you mean. It’s always nice to know they did as much as possible “for real”. Having a burning building scene and then finding out in the director’s commentary that all the fire was entirely CG, would be a bit… disappointing somehow.
I was mainly pinpointing shonky CGI work, or stuff that made things look *too* spectacular. I suppose these days, stuff has to be *so* much bigger to impress people that it gets silly. I still maintain you can’t beat the old Bond formula of a fantastic stunt performed by a team/skilled individual before the opening credits. So many amazing ones.
I wonder if they’d really do the twisted bridge scene from >Golden Gun these days, or just CGI it?
Agree. Or the jump-into-plane, from… eh, I can’t even remember which one.