There once was a Knight and a Day

There was a great shot in the preview

That guaranteed it would get my view

Though nobody's going

And reviews aren't glowing

I thought it was pretty good – it's true!

One doesn't often describe action movies as "cute," but Knight and Day turns out to be maybe the most adorable blockbuster ever. With one caveat... if you've got Tom Cruise issues, you'll hate this like Hudson Hawk.

Because even tho a bunch of stuff blows up real good, Knight and Day succeeds almost entirely on how much you like/dislike Cruise and Cameron. Despite his cults, couches and CGI doves, I still count myself as Team Tom, particularly when he's Les Grossman. And he's in full-on movie star mode here, all cocksure come-ons and badass poses. Cameron Diaz also plays basically an idealized version of herself, smiling thru a series of supercute costume changes – sometimes with a gun.

The plot basically amounts to one long chase scene, with the movie's MacGuffin being a perpetual fusion battery or some such thing. Peter Saarsgard's the rival spy who may or may not be the bad guy, depending on whether you think Cruise's character has gone insanely rogue or just wackily bullet-happy. None of it really matters – the fun of the flick is watching the leads play off each other, and they're clearly having a better time than they did in Vanilla Sky.

Part of what makes the movie works is James Mangold's offbeat direction – his resume (Walk the Line, Girl Interrupted) doesn't exactly scream "high-octane summer adventure" and watching him experiment with the format is entertaining in its own right. Some of the set pieces have a classic action movie soundtrack, while others are backed by light Italian classical tunes or jazzy spins on Harold Faltermeyer's Axel F. And the scenes themselves unfold almost languidly, giving the entire endeavor a slightly dreamy feel.

Here's the thing: if you break the movie down into its basic elements, there's not a ton of "there" there. But if you like the leads and are willing to go with it, the sum is definitely greater than the whole of its parts. So go ahead and embrace the excesses of big-time mainstream Hollywood moviemaking – despite the fact that America seems uninterested, I think it's worth a watch.