Director James Mangold, with successful movies such as Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma, delivers again with Knight and Day. Mangold’s films entertain us. I don’t mind paying to see a movie if I can walk away feeling I got my money’s worth, which is somewhat rare these days, but I was pleasantly pleased with Knight and Day.

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz are both good actors, although I’m not a huge fan of theirs, the chemistry and charisma the two create in this film makes me want to watch them more often.  Roy Miller, (Cruise), plays a super spy who meets June Havens (Diaz) in Wichita, Kansas at the airport on her way to Boston for her sister’s wedding.  Cameron Diaz plays the somewhat scattered brain June with a great believable performance. Roy secretly slips something into June’s bag in order to get it past security. He then joins her on the flight where they begin to chat while drinking mini bottles of tequila. The chatting turns into flirting when June finds herself really liking this charming, handsome man she just met. Then June excuses herself to go to the restroom after turbulence causes her to spill a drink on herself. Roy escorts her.  Once June is safely inside the restroom, Roy turns around when the handful of passengers on this flight are revealed as assassins who are there to kill him.  Fights breakout and everyone, including the pilots, are all killed by Roy, except one pilot who was accidentally killed by the other pilot. The next thing you know Roy is crash landing the plane into a cornfield.

The plot has to do with a battery called the zephyr, invented by young genius, Simon Feck (Paul Dano). Everyone wants it, (“good guys, bad guys, and worse guys”) because it is supposedly the greatest energy source since the sun. Roy has to find Simon to get him and the zephyr to safety. Meanwhile, he feels he needs to keep June safe for inadvertently getting her involved in this situation.  This takes June on a journey to exotic places, where she has no clue how she got there because Roy drugs her for her own good.  She ends up on high-speed chases with cars flipping end-over-end and even stampeding bulls in Spain.

It’s all here, action, drama, comedy, and romance. There was never a dull moment. Knight and Day is the perfect movie to see this summer.