Rushing to get home for her sister’s wedding, June Havens (Cameron Diaz) bumps into Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) not once but twice at the airport. She manages to get a last-minute seat on his near-empty flight though, and the pair gets chatting about their ideal travel destination.…

It’s a rather innocuous start, but just a few minutes later while June is in the toilet, Roy is takin’ care of business: killing the entire crew and passengers, who all seem out to get something he has: “Zephyr”, a super battery that has unlimited, everlasting power.

June knows none of this of course, but she cottons on pretty quick once Roy crash-lands the plane and drugs her: the FBI are coming, he warns. She wakes up safely back at home in Boston, but soon enough FBI agent Fitzgerald (Sarsgaard) turns up.

Before June knows it she’s in the middle of a freeway chase, the bullets flying and the bodies piling up as Roy comes to the rescue. A frantic journey that takes in a desert island, Austria and Spain follows as Roy explains that he and Fitzgerald were assigned to guard geek/genius Simon Feck (Paul Dano), but Fitzgerald got greedy and wanted to sell the battery to Spanish arms dealer Antonio (Jordi Molla). Naturally, June joins Roy on the run – he promises her that it’s the only way she’s gonna be safe…

In the US, Knight & Day is being seen as a test of whether Cruise still has “it” (note the poster features white silhouettes, not the usual huge picture of his face), and with an alleged nine writers having a shot at the script it’s no surprise that what emerges is a big mess.

This aint no Cary Grant/Hitchcock caper movie – it’s far too violent for that – but isn’t quite an action thriller either because of the attempt at a soft-focus, continent-crossing “romance”. This “romance” however involves Roy drugging June (twice), shooting her fireman ex-boyfriend, cuffing her to him and generally acting as if he’s seriously deranged – all in order to “keep her safe”. It’s astonishing she doesn’t take every opportunity to run away from him!

At times he seems like a dangerous stalker, and since the power of the battery is never explained or demonstrated (leaving Paul Dano with nothing to do at all), the villain so weak and poorly-defined (why have Sarsgaard and Molla?) it’s inconceivable why June joins him on this “journey”.

Over the tedious 100 minutes or so it’s near-impossible not to notice the endless holes in the plot as well; if the FBI is searching the world for them, how do they take endless domestic flights or pay for the hotel or buy clothes? Conveniently, much of this seems to happen when June is (once again) knocked out by Roy, but even then it’s all just so unbelievable.

Apparently Cruise and Diaz had to do re-shoots in January, February, March and even May this year, which tells you something: it seems that no-one knew quite what Knight & Day was, nor how to make it whatever that way was. 

Knight and Day will be released on August 6.