In its heart, Knight and Day is a throw back to the rom-com adventures of old – a globe-trotting escapade akin to Charade and Romancing the Stone. It boasts a classic leading man opposite a rom-com sweetheart. It’s fueled by spies and chases, romance and double-crosses. It’s mysterious and it’s exciting, sentimental and ambitious. Indeed, Knight and Day dreams big… only to wake up to a reality of lost potential and missed opportunity.
Like every Richard Kelly movie, The Box is full of heady ideas and messy execution. And as was the case in Donnie Darko (2001) and Southland Tales (2006), there’s beauty in the madness. Based on a short story called “Button, Button”, Kelly’s latest is essentially a prolonged Twilight Zone episode pushed over the edge – a box arrives on the doorstep of Norma and Arthur Lewis (Cameron Diaz and James Marsden), and with it a strange man to explain its presence. Inside the box is a button. If the Lewis family chooses to press this button, they will be awarded $1 million. But someone, somewhere in the world – someone they don’t know – will die. They have 24 hours to decide. Oh, and conveniently, their financial life is coincidentally in a shambles.
