All County, All the Time Since 2010 MAKE THIS YOUR PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY HOME...PAGE!  Friday, March 29th, 2024

Dumb, dumberer, explode, exploderer

Well, this week is another twofer for a couple of reasons. I’m not sure there’s a single review in either film and there are so many similarities that it begs a shared space.
Knight and Day, starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz is the dumbest film I’ve ever enjoyed. Talk about suspending belief. The rules of engagement are simple. You have to understand that the minute a bad guy is handed a machine gun he becomes incapable of hitting a moving or stationary target. Bad guys can travel vast distances in such short periods of time and the big boss always handles things personally.
It sounds like I’m being critical but this movie is just plain fun. It starts simply, with ever-so-charming Tom Cruise bumping into Cameron Diaz at the airport.
Turns out it isn’t an accident at all – he’s picked her to smuggle this little battery-like object thru the airport for him. Dude is an eagle scout secret agent marksman spy voodoo mind control expert and he can’t outsmart Cleveland air security. OK seems fair.
This sets off a whole series of improbable events that lead to an unbelievable conclusion which included but isn’t limited to a high speed chase on a motorcycle where they are doging bulls, enemy gunfire, secret agents and bad guys and he spins her around from the back of the motorcycle, so she can sit on the handlebars backwards shooting the bad guys, all of this at 140km an hour. It makes the forced landing of the plane, in the field of wheat, the singlehanded take down of the fortress of bad guy invincibility and the ability to dodge heavily armed drones on a small island credible.
This may all sound goofy and negative but it’s actually great fun. It is the summer movie equivalent of a corn dog. You can suffer through your bulgar wheat and hummus cereal thru the rest of the year but once in a while, and its usually during the summer, you need to eat something fried and battered.
One of the great things about Knight and Day is they know they’re goofy and they don’t try to be anything else. There’s some chemistry between Crusis and Diaz which helps. She certainly holds her own in the action department. I really liked the scene where she’s fed truth serum and she just can’t help but share every opinion that pops into her head. It’s played for laughs and I just really enjoyed it. Later in the scene under heavy fire, outnumbered 8 to 1 and running out of bullets she looks at him in that pouty way and suggests that he deosn’t seem very happy to see her. So he drops his arms, holsters his guns and walks thru the line of fire to give her a hug. It’s so cheesy that short of him turning and winking at the camera we all get the joke and the redeeming quality of this film is so does it.
It’s summer entertainment and a welcome relief from the big brains stuff I’ve been watching lately. I loved Inception but this was such a welcome relief after a couple of nights of that.
Make no mistake you’re not going to get a brain cramp following the story line and if you look even a little bit closely you’re going to see the flaws. But who cares? Sit back and enjoy your pogo. You know it’s not just a battered weiner. It’s also a nitrate delivery system.
In the other corner we have Salt. Interestingly the role was originally written for the couch jumper himself, but Cruise turned it down when they couldn’t pony up the 20 million he wanted, so Angelina Jolie heard about it and said she’d take the role if they left it exactly as it had been written for Tom.
It also defies the laws of well, everything including gravity. She plays a secret agent who is outed by the guy who allegedly trained her to be a double agent years ago in Russia when she was just a wee baby girl. Spoiler alert – secrets are about to be told.
Not really, I just like throwing in that spolier alert. It makes the paragraph seem more exciting.
So there are two schools of movie fighting. One involves bludgeoning the opponent. Drag him down knock him out kind of fighting – bricks, hammers 2×4’s whatever’s handy and the guy keeps getting back up. Then there’s door number 2. The mere wind from a fist going by knocks the dude out cold. I suspect that’s how I would go down if I was attacked by the forces of good, and it’s how most of the CIA gets taken out in this movie. Salt is a one woman wrecking crew. She either knows the Spock vulcan grip or she has some kind of deadly force in those little fists.
It’s cool.
She kills everyone in her wake, and of course there are no obstacles that can deter her. There are several plot twists and turns and again none of it holds water if you look close enough. Does that really matter?
I’m not a big Jolie fan. We know way too much about her private life, where she’s been, how she’s been and with and it’s all very messy and that makes it hard to forget it’s her on screen. To her credit she disappears into the role. She is Salt. I like that it isn’t a frame up, and while we don’t understand until the end the why’s and wherefores of this, we learn very quickly that she is in fact a double agent. Or is she?????
I like that she plays it all on her personality, there’s no sexy innuendo or double entendre. I guess if  Tom Cruise won’t show his rack neither will she.
It’s a good watch, not as fun as Knight and Day but totally entertaining. I might watch it again just to get a body count, because I think it might hit triple digits. Cool. That’s my kind of relaxation.
For all the fellers who think most movies don’t have enough ‘splosions and stuff, this is a treat and a half. It has as many unbelievable scenes as K and D. I especially enjoyed her outrunning all the secret agents in Washington by jumping from speeding tractor trailer to trailer. Luckily they all involved body jarring heights as well.
I strongly reccommend both of these films and you’re going to need these because Eat Pray Love is out this Friday and testosterone levels are going to be plummeting across the land.
As always, other opinions are welcome, but wrong. That’s it for this week. The cheque’s in the mail and I’m outta here. Paul

Filed Under: Paul Peterson

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