Movie Review: "Knight and Day"

5. "Knight and Day" is a pleasant enough romantic action movie in the style of "Bird on a Wire" or "Romancing the Stone."

4. Tom Cruise plays a secret agent on the run and Cameron Diaz is the grinning goofy girl who gets entangled in his version of "Run, Lola, Run."

3. Cruise and Diaz sizzle in their second pairing (the first was the wretched "Vanilla Sky"), which is noteworthy given that Cruise is hardly the box office bounty he once was and Diaz is 12 years removed from her breakout-role in "There's Something About Mary."

2. This may dent my manly-man armor, but I could have done with a little more kiss-kiss and a lot less bang-bang.

1. Still, the flick manages to be good, entertaining fun that hinges on the stars' money shots -- Cruise looking intense over the top of a pair of sun glasses and and Diaz's grin, perhaps the most cheerful and charismatic in cinema -- especially when she's wearing a bikini.

=========================
"Knight and Day"
Run time: 1 hour, 50 minues
Rated PG-13
Genre: Comedy-Action-Adventure‎
Director: James Mangold
Cast: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Maggie Grace, Peter Sarsgaard, Marc Blucas
Finney's Flicks Grade: B

Movie Review: "Harry Brown"

5. Great actors can elevate mediocre material so Michael Caine's lead role in "Harry Brown" gives the unoriginal movie a sense of gravitas the script does not actually offer.

4. Decorated veteran Harry Brown is a retiree who lives in a hellish London apartment complex overrun by drug-dealing thugs and juvenile delinquents to make "Boys In The Hood" and "Menace 2 Society" proud.

3. In the tradition of "Death Wish," Brown is pushed to the edge -- his wife dies of old age and his best friend is murdered by a gang of street toughs who hang out in a pedestrian subway near their apartments.

2. What follows is what you'd expect -- Caine's Harry Brown takes the law into his own hands and seeks a reckoning with his friend's killers.

1. Caine is, of course, excellent and is as believable pumping bullets into creepy drug dealers as he is giving warm soliloquies about falling in with his wife, but the film offers few notable surprises and is generally unsatisfying.

=====================
"Harry Brown"
Run time: 1 hour, 43 minutes
Rated R‎‎
Genre: Suspense-Thriller‎
Director: Daniel Barber
Cast: Emily Mortimer, Michael Caine, Iain Glen, Liam Cunningham and Jack O'Connel
Finney's Flicks Grade: C+