I don't get the attitude surrounding this film, really. Some reviewers made this film out to be some sort of hideous travesty that was some sort of career wrecker for messrs Cruise and Diaz. Personally, I thought it was a lot of fun. Admittedly, it isn't great art and not all of the jokes land home, but the onscreen couple here show a great deal of brio and chemistry, the lack of which can so easily wreck a film. If it's an irrational hatred of Tom Cruise, then I suppose this film would annoy you. For me, he's just really good fun and seems to be enjoying himself, which comes across well. The story itself is largely an incidental thing. Something to do with an everlasting battery and internal betrayals in the FBI. Basically, Tom Cruise is Roy, a secret agent supposedly gone rogue who encounters June, a perfectly ordinary girl on a flight from Wichita. Of course, their meeting results in the plot kick-starting, and June eventually ends up meeting Roy yet again several times more, and gets drawn into his secretive life.
I enjoyed this film a lot. Loads of location hopping, secret agent business and extravagant stunts that is all knitted together to make perhaps the summers most accessibly popcorn-munching film. It's a laugh basically, what else do you want? It refuses to take itself seriously, which after the Bourne-ification of every secret agent these days is actually quite refreshing. It seems to be aiming for the dizzy heights of The Man Who Knew Too Much and similar such Hitchcockian splendour, but doesn't quite make it. I never said the film was perfect. The plot in a way is far too sidelined, the whole battery macguffin just feeling too forced to really matter. Occasionally it lacks polish, and the whole 'June gets drugged' joke, though initially funny, does get used rather too often, feeling like a clunky way of the filmmakers to advance the plot. The subordinate characters are also fairly token, with little or no characterisation. The core couple are our focus, and they are rather impressively nuanced. Such as Roy's propensity to lie to June but only to protect her life. There are also June's familial relationships; her sister is getting married, and June wants to give her a car she has been doing up. She discovers with dismay that her sister was planning on selling it anyway, showing that in a way, the only like minded person in June's life is this man she barely knows.
'Yes, we DID improv Jerry Maguire! No, I don't know why either!'
It's all fun, and in my opinion, hard to dislike. It's fluff, yes, but it's fun fluff. You got good action, silly jokes and a generally rather fast flowing story which is thin as hell, but hey, I really enjoyed it. So yes, see it! The Cruiser is good in it, don't worry. Just don't think about scientology while watching it.
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