TheRetroCritic

At this point The Coen Brothers could pretty much do anything and I'd zombie my way to the cinema without thinking twice about it. With Gambit , a remake of sorts, it looked like they might have written another farce in the vein of The Ladykillers , a film which I've always felt was wrongly underrated. Alas, they aren't on directing duty this time... We follow Colin Firth's art curator as he hires Cameron Diaz's rodeo queen to help him pull off an elaborate heist involving a rare Monet painting. The goal being to piss off Alan Rickman's odious art collector and make quite a few bucks in the process. The film is going for a 60's-style screwball comedy vibe and with a strong cast like this one and a script by the Coens, you'd expect nothing less than a sharp, fun, clever little flick. Sadly, whatever wit we found in the likes of Fargo and whatever cartoonish shenanigans we found in The Ladykillers are nowhere to be seen in Gambit. Sure the film o

Ok, so I'm actually watching Knight And Day while posting this and I still have no idea what DAY is in that god forsaken ass title. Why?! I mean, I know Cruise's character's parents are called Knight but he's actually called Roy Miller and Diaz's character is called June Havens so... Well, I guess her sister's called April which is another month which contains days... Nope.  That can't be it. They fucked up: they fucked up bad. You can't just sacrifice sense for THE cheesiest pun out there! See! Oh dear, looks like I'll have to check out what my country of origin, La France, has to say about that translation-wise... No no no no NO!!! Bordel de merde!!! KNIGHT makes sense!!! Then again, Night And Day makes sense but... that's the pun! You've unpunned the pun! Now it both makes sense and is completely altogether meaningless. Night And Day... that could be about anything! Come on Italy, you can do this, you can fix it! Rea

Cruise and Diaz are reunited for the first time since Vanilla Sky in this silly, sunny Hitchcockian spy comedy and although the film never reaches high levels of intelligence, what it lacks in brains it makes up for in gusto. Although it has been compared with the likes of North By Northwest , this is actually much closer to the lighter To Catch a Thief or even the Goldie Hawn/Chevy Chase 80's comedies. Cruise is clearly having a ball in a Mission Impossible -style role with added OTT silliness and Diaz is fine as his ditzy sidekick, if slightly annoying in places. The plot is nothing to ride home about, something about a powerful battery (MacGuffin) which may or may not be useful to something or other. Whatever. It provides little more than silly lines ("Because it's filled with POWER!") and a thin strand of reason to hold everything together. What really hurts the film strangely is the CGI. It works mostly but sometimes the green screen is jus