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Classic car restorer June Havens (Cameron Diaz) literally bumps into FBI covert agent Roy Miller (Tom Cruise) in the Wichita (Kansas) airport while boarding her flight back to Boston. Turns out that Roy is also on her flight, and everything they do from there turns June's life topsy-turvy as they become involved in an attempt to hide the Zephyr, a superbattery that can power a small city and never runs out of energy, and to protect its inventor, Simon Feck (Paul Dano). Unfortunately, Roy has been accused of going rogue, and both he and the Zephry are being sought by CIA director Isabel George (Viola Davis), FBI agent John Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard), and Spanish arms dealer Antonio Quintana (Jordi Mollà), as well as various other "bad guys" and assassins.

Knight and Day is credited to American screenwriter Patrick O'Neill, although he wrote the screenplay as a spec, and it was added to by numerous other screenwriters, including Scott Frank, Laea Kalogridis, Ted Griffin, Dana Fox, and Simon Kinberg.

Originally, the movie was going to be titled Wichita, then changed to Trouble Man before being released as Knight and Day. The title is a play on "night and day", an English idiom used to describe two things that are polar opposites of each other, as are June and Roy. It makes an additional play on words by changing the spelling from "night" to "knight" in that Roy's actual birthname is Matthew Knight, he purchases a small knight figurine at the beginning of the movie that plays a larger role as the story unfolds, and he rescues June from her rather drab existence as would a "knight in shiny armor". Some astute viewers have even noted that Cameron Diaz's last name can be spelled "dias", which translates from Spanish to English as "day". Others point out that the movie focuses on the things that Roy hopes to do "some day", which Roy has learned to translate as "never".

After doing so, Fitz says to himself, "Always the classics, Roy." He is referring to the Alfred Hitchcock classic mystery The Lady Vanishes (1938) (1938) in which a lady (who ultimately vanishes) writes her name in the condensation on a dining car window on a train. In the morning, after the lady vanishes, her new acquaintance in the dining car tries to find her, but everyone denies ever knowing her, even though they all spoke to her in full view of the new acquaintance the night before. Being told that she is hallucinating from a blow to the head the previous day, the new acquaintance satisfies her own sanity by breathing on the window where she sees the lady's name appear. It is also used with the same effect in Flightplan (2005) (2005) in which a woman's daughter, who later goes missing, draws a heart on the window of their airplane. Somewhat interestingly, Peter Sarsgaard, who plays Fitz in this movie, also played the lead male role in Flightplan.

Despite Simon's objections, Roy tosses the Zephyr to Fitzgerald. Fitz shoots Roy in the shoulder and then boards a seaplane waiting to take him to Quintana. Feck explains to Roy that the battery is actually unstable. As they watch the plane climb, the Zephyr explodes, killing Fitz. Roy collapses from his wound, and June accompanies him on the flight-for-life. He wakes up in a Washington D.C. hospital with CIA Director Isabel George at his side. She thanks him for "cleaning house" and apologizes for trusting the wrong man. Roy asks about June, and Isabel explains that they sent her home with the understanding that she and Roy are too different to spend their lives together and that Roy is valuable to the agency only as long as he stays focused. She also tells him that he'll be transferred tomorrow to a secure facility for his safety, and then she leaves. As Roy lies on his bed, pondering his circumstances, a nurse comes into the room with his medication, which he drinks. He suddenly begins to feel whoozy and asks the nurse what she gave him. "Brotine-zero," she replies, while turning around. Roy sees that it is June before he begins to pass out. June wheels him out of the hospital on a gurney and into her waiting GTO. When he wakes up, Roy finds himself dressed in shorts, on a beach with June, and heading for Cape Horn. "What day is this?", he asks June, and she replies, "Someday." In the final scene, the Knights receive two tickets to Cape Horn that they didn't order, but Mrs Knight (Celia Weston) assumes that Mr Knight (Dale Dye) forgot that he ordered them on the Internet, just like all those other unordered Publisher Clearinghouse and lottery tickets that keep coming in.

Cape Horn is at the southernmost tip of South America. It forms the northern boundary of the Drake Passage, a waterway between Chile and Antarctica, once the only way ships could get from the Atlantic side of the Americas to the Pacific side (and vice versa) until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The climate is generally cool, rainy, and highly windy, not the kind of place for lolling on the beach.

The movie is not very clear about this, so viewers have debated both sides of the question. Some conclude that her parting comment to Roy about taking him to "a secure location for his safety" is an alert to the audience that using those words "secure" and "safe" are sure indications that she means to have him killed, making her one of the "bad guys". At the very least, most viewers agree that the CIA has no intention of letting Roy leave the agency, since he's their best agent. Others argue that the director may actually have been a "good guy", helping June sneak Roy out of the hospital, hoping he would get the message and simply leave the country, in essence sponsoring his retirement because of what he did to protect Simon and the Zephyr as well as weeding out the corrupt agents like Fitzgerald. We do know that nothing bad happened to Simon (he was given a new lab) or Roy's parents (they were given tickets to join him in Cape Horn), so it's doubtful that the CIA had any evil intentions against Roy.

"Differente" by Gotan Project.

Lately, as a matter of routine, an extended cut has been produced and released for the home market and its worth it. By now, outside the US, both versions—the extended and the theatrical—have been released on BD and on DVD. An additional action sequence has been integrated, the character of June has got more background and some combat scenes have been extended by some tougher takes in the extended version. The 7 minutes more running time arent exorbitant verbosely but rather enhance the already entertaining movie.