The LA Times devotes a lot of space to asking wny the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz movie “Knight and Day” is a massive flop. And some poor bastard at Fox totally falls on his sword.

But why didn’t the young moviegoers come too? Sella falls silent. “Honestly, I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve still got to try and figure that out.” He dismissed complaints about the film’s title, arguing that titles, good or bad, are overrated. “If there are three words that you should never put in any title, its [sic] ‘Dead Poet’s Society,’ and yet that film was a huge success. Titles really don’t hurt movies, and for that matter, I don’t know what else we could have called it. What we were up against was bigger than that.”

“What we were up against”?

The article touches on lots of possible reasons why the movie’s a dud: Tom Cruise’s weirdness, a bad movie poster, bad trailer, and so on.

The one reason not discussed: Apparently the movie sucks.

It’s been fun reading A.O. Scott absolutely tee off on the film.

A loud, seemingly interminable, and altogether incoherent entry in the preposterous and proliferating “action-comedy” genre, it stars Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz as a pair of hastily sketched cartoon characters hurtling from plane crash to car chase to further car, helicopter and motorcycle chases, one involving stampeding bulls.

Scott hated the movie so much, he went out of his way to trash it again in a long essay about action pix.

That film consists of one over-the-top, overblown blowup session after another — not one showing a scrap of wit — arranged in unvarying, hysterical rhythm. The C.G.I. looks cheap and rubbery (the two stars don’t look much better), and the illusion of watching three-dimensional objects moving in actual space is almost completely lost.

So it’s interesting that the LA Times piece doesn’t even raise the possibility that audiences can sniff a stinker before they see one. And this suggests something consistent about modern Hollywood: It is so convinced it can shove any piece of garbage down America’s throat that if a movie bombs, it can’t be because, well, it just isn’t any good….

Here’s a thought: Audiences like stories and characters. Dead Poet’s Society (see below) certainly had both. So does the unquestionable hit of the summer, the appropriately titled “Toy Story III.” Knight and Day seems to have neither.