Knight and Day (2010) Review

rating: ****

the story: A CIA operative has been set up, and in the process of clearing his name his life becomes entangled with an unlikely accomplice.

review: I will readily admit, until a rewatch a few weeks back I was as convinced as anyone that Knight and Day was nothing much writing about. In 2010 Tom Cruise was scrambling to put his career back on track, and when I saw this particular effort in theaters I thought it was a particularly desperate byproduct. I even dismissed costar Cameron Diaz, who has been a favorite since her film debut in The Mask, as forgettable.

I don’t believe any of that anymore.

If anything, Knight and Day has the potential of being a modern classic. It’s lighthearted and flippant concerning its surface action elements. The whole point is calculated screwball, which in older Hollywood days was the holy grail of romantic comedy. It’s a unique movie in Cruise’s career, which has in the decade or so since its release relied ever more heavily on straight action.

It’s really a waltz between Cruise and Diaz; eventually the tables are turned and it’s Diaz in control rather than the character who seems to have been one step ahead and her to be dozens of steps behind. 

And there’s plenty of support around them, too, something of an embarrassment. Maggie Grace, officially wrapping up her time on Lost, is there in one of her many tiny supporting roles (she’s also in the Taken movies, although you’d be forgiven to assume they’re all just Liam Neeson brandishing his action jones). Peter Sarsgaard (nearly always a villain, alas!), Viola Davis, Paul Dano actually feeling like he’s perfectly cast for a change, even Gal Gadot!

The director in charge of all this is the perennially criminally underrated James Mangold, who has proven himself a master of modern cinema. In fact, restoring Knight and Day, and this is not why I choose to champion it now but it’s a nice benefit, as a treasure would add an additional feather to his cap (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma, Logan, Ford v Ferrari).

Too often today we reduce the art of moviemaking to…whatever’s not the box office blockbuster. There’s a huge tradition and a wide range of material out there. Recognizing achievements is a fine way to encourage the breadth of the medium to continue pursuing that range, rather than allowing it to narrow to “blockbuster” and “art film.”

That and acknowledging that movie stars continue to deliver, regardless of whatever happens in their personal life.

Looper (2012)

rating: ****

the story: A mob hitman in the future is involved in a scheme involving time travel.

what it's all about: This is likely the movie that got Rian Johnson the Star Wars gig, and you can see The Last Jedi in that ending...!

Looper was originally known as the movie where Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the younger Bruce Willis, or Bruce Willis plays the older Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  Either way, they play the same character.  It's a couple decades in the future.  But three decades after that, time travel is now possible.  But the only people who use it, because of all the regulations, are the mob.  And they use it mainly to dispose of bodies.  They have hitmen in the past who kill the victims.  "Looper" is the term given to these hitmen because eventually they "close the loop," kill their own future self, sent to the past with final payment.  So they live the next thirty years and then get sent back to the past, to be killed by themselves. 

Yeah.  But being the mob, it's not a good thing if you don't do it.  We get a dramatic example of this with Paul Dano.  Paul Dano is the kind of actor that if he's going full Paul Dano, it's best in small doses.  Most famously, he was the second lead of There Will Be Blood.  To my mind, this was the cause of the horrible unbalance in that movie, because there could only be so much Paul Dano.  He's got the same kind of part in Cowboys & Aliens, 12 Years a Slave...Really, he can never really do the Paul Dano thing and have a decent-size role.

Anyway, so there's not a lot of Paul Dano in it, and that's just as well.  This was supposed to be one of Gordon-Levitt's leading man mainstream establishing roles, but I think the idea of the movie was too complicated.  Besides the hitman looping thing, there's also a kid who grows up to be the guy who "closes all the loops," and he's got a wicked case of telekinesis.  For some people, more than one gimmick is one gimmick too many.  I'd suggest, in a world where time travel is possible, it's likely that the laws of nature have altered enough so that anything's possible.  Maybe a cleverer movie would've explained that, maybe even tied in the existence of telekinesis with time travel.  Maybe it's not really necessary.  Maybe explaining the concept of looping is enough explanation.  Audiences hate explanations more than they hate more than one gimmick.

But if you don't have a problem with any of that, the story is pretty simple, and it's about the cycle of violence, and how to end it.  That's what Gordon-Levitt's character ultimately has to do.  He and his future self, Bruce Willis, are at odds about how to solve the problem of the guy who "closes all the loops."  Because in Gordon-Levitt's time, the guy is just a kid, and his mom is Emily Blunt, and Gordon-Levitt kind of becomes...involved in this little family unit.  He's lost his objectivity.  He probably lost it the minute Bruce Willis showed up, honestly.  (It's okay that he struggled with it over Paul Dano.) 

Apparently Deadpool 2 has the same sort of dilemma, that paradox of essentially killing Hitler when he was a kid.  When you phrase it like that, the audience is always going to side with killing Hitler.  But they don't make movies about killing Hitler as a kid.  I guess that's why there's stuff like Inglourious Basterds.  Gordon-Levitt's solution is to open the loop.  He realizes Bruce Willis trying to kill the kid is what created the guy who "closes all the loops."  So he shoots himself and Bruce Willis no longer exists, and the kid doesn't become the guy who "closes all the loops."  History goes in another direction.

The Last Jedi is all about opting for different results.  This angered a lot of Star Wars fans, as they were pretty committed to the idea of Star Wars being recognizable (even while, paradoxically, complaining that these new movies keep revisiting old territory).  Saying that there is a different way to solve the galaxy's problems...Well, anyway, that's what Last Jedi is about, and that's the philosophy of Looper.  That's Rian Johnson.  He also gave us Brick, a different kind of noir mystery, set in high school.  Dude loves the unexpected.

Ah, also showing up in the movie are Piper Perabo (small role, mostly nude), Garrett Dillahunt (perennially underappreciated, likely because of his name), and Jeff Daniels, who gets to play the mob boss.  He doesn't need to do much mob business, onscreen, to be taken seriously.  That dude is seriously underappreciated.