'Knight and Day' a snoozefest

"Knight and Day"

One and one half stars

By Gary Buiso

“Knight and Day” is a romantic thriller with all the appeal of a spent bottle rocket on the Fifth of July.

The film plays like the B-side version of stars Tom Cruise's and Cameron Diaz's better films: “Collateral” meets “Charlie’s Angels” — and it’s not nearly as good as either.

Sure, there’s something that could pass for chemistry between the pair, but it is an impossible mission to make the disposable story seem fresh.

Roy Miller is a wise-cracking-but-deadly special agent who may have gone rogue in an effort to stop a really powerful battery from falling into the wrong hands, in this case a swarthy Spanish arms-dealer with bad intentions.

On a flight to Boston, Miller scopes out June Havens (Diaz), a feisty innocent who gets caught up in the high stakes world of international battery-smuggling.

It’s risky business for June: she’s not sure if Roy’s a fugitive or just misunderstood. But he’s far and away the most exciting gent to safely land a airplane in a cornfield she’s ever met.

The film, directed by James Mangold (“Walk the Line”) and written by Patrick O’Neill, takes an episodic approach, going through the motions at one exotic locale to the next, tossing in cookie-cutter villains and stampeding bulls for good measure.

There might be a lot of action in “Knight and Day,” but it still is a snooze.

“Knight and Day.” Rated PG-13 for sequences of action violence throughout, and brief strong language. 110 minutes. With Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Jordi Mollà, and Paul Dano. Playing in Brooklyn at Access Digital Theatres - Pavilion Cinema in Park Slope, UA Court Street Stadium 12 in Cobble Hill, UA Sheepshead Bay 14, Bay Ridge Alpine Cinemas, Linden Boulevard Multiplex Cinemas in East New York.