Knight and Day: C
I went only to get out of the heat, I promise. But it's Saturday, and in case you need a mindless movie — men shooting and exploding, women posing, blinking, and shrieking — I admit I had fun with this flick, and the big screen will add a lot.
Tom Cruise's action hero is a rogue FBI agent (Well, has he really gone rogue? We kind of like our rogues, but we can’t be having them as clean-cut heroes, can we?). Cameron Diaz is the girl he bumps into and swoon-i-fies.
To me, Knight and Day is no dumber than 007, and Cameron Diaz offers a beauty that looks healthier, more realistic, less cartoonish and less slutty than James Bond’s babes (on both the good and the evil teams).
My big question is not why the movie isn’t better art—did somebody expect a serious film? But I do wonder why I haven’t heard serious bellowing from serious feminists about the anti-serious woman Cameron Diaz plays. Her shrieking helplessness, moronic moves, cutesy poses, and underlying good girl are a throwback to the 1950s.
Maybe we’ve reached the point where such a blatant dismissal of women is too obvious and absurd to be worth a shout, especially when she’s abducted and governed by an equally ridiculous hero — a savvy, winking, pretty (I guess), athletic, dead-eye, in-all-ways-flawless, in fact, super-human male warrior. And by the way, like you or me, he's been wronged by The Man. (But he's only pissed off in a focused, seemly way).
So maybe the movie’s regressive treatment of gender roles is good news—the glass ceiling now has so many cracks from up-fired bullets of women that we can let down our guard. However, the box office success here makes me wonder just how our youth see males and females. Is this just a lark for them? Did they know they were checking their brains at the door, or are they being instructed on how to be in the world? But that’s too serious. Isn’t it?
**
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