Tom Cruise has been written off more times than the English football team, so perhaps we shouldn't be too concerned by the brickbats currently being thrown at new comedy thriller Knight and Day, in which he co-stars with Cameron Diaz. The film has certainly picked up a few snotty reviews in the US, where it arrives this weekend, but this is an actor who managed to survive the twin horrors of ill-judged second world war tale Valkyrie and tedious thinkpiece Lions For Lambs, so suggestions that his career is dead in the water may be a little premature.

US gossip writer Perez Hilton has gone so far as to hint that studio bosses designed the poster for Knight and Day to hide the actor's face, so convinced are they that he lacks popularity. Paramount boss Sumner Redstone gave the actor his thumbs-down a few years ago when he cut the studio's 14-year tie with Cruise amid concerns about his off-screen conduct.

Knight and Day sees Cruise as a mysterious action man who crash-lands in Diaz's life, claiming to be a rogue CIA agent. The storyline sees the pair careering around the world as they are chased by US secret service types, Spanish drug dealers and German assassins. The film is described by the New York Post's Lou Lumenick as a "big, dumb summer movie with no apparent ambition" and "an ultra-predictable plot that seems to have been cranked out by a computer screenwriting program without significant human input". Variety's Justin Chang berates "a high-energy, low-impact caper-comedy" and The Seattle Times's Moira Macdonald suggests it is little more than "a computer-generated assortment of random Hollywood action-movie scenes shuffled together".

Talk is that Cruise took just $11m (£7.4m) to star, rather than his usual $20m cut, and has foregone a share of the profits. Could Knight and Day really be the movie that sees him finally fall off his A-list perch? It's certainly the case that this is exactly the kind of breezy, cheesy mainstream fare that would have been utterly critic-proof just a few years ago, but has all the sofa-jumping and scientology spouting turned off moviegoers? Or is action Cruise just a bit past it at 47? We'll find out what the score is when the film arrives in the UK on August 6