Oh, what breezily delightful nonsense.

For those stern critics already pooh-poohing “Knight and Day” for those exact characteristics, I need only ask them: What the heck do we see movies for anyway?

Man cannot live on “Seven Samurai” alone.

More often than not, man is spoon-fed cinematic formulaic pap that we’re supposed to enjoy because—well, I guess because we’ve been told we’re going to like it. (“Borat,” for instance. “Sex and the City 2,” for another. “Splice” . . . the list is humongous!)

However, once in awhile, somebody lets us know—with a wink and smile—that while we’re getting formula, it’s souped-up in a particularly enjoyable sort of way. How? Pure character-driven dialogue. “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” had it. “Dan in Real Life” had it. Even “The African Queen”—when you strip away Bogart and Hepburn’s priceless performances—was pretty simple movie math. But add two characters who sparkle and, yeah, it works.

So, really . . . am I equating “Knight and Day” with “The African Queen”?

What I am saying is, 20 years from now, when we stumble across “Knight and Day” on latenight TV amid a slew of other, far more pretentious films, I suspect many of us are likely to watch “Knight and Day” simply because it makes us smile. (If you don’t like to smile, then go ahead, watch that more pretentious film. They’re made for somebody.)

In “Knight and Day” Tom Cruise plays Roy Miller, a secret agent who may—or may not— be a renegade lunatic. Tom Cruise also plays Tom Cruise, and one might suspect that Cruise as Roy Miller is also goofing on himself half the time.

Or, more aptly, goofing on those of us in the audience suspicious of his motivations as an actor or even as a human being, perhaps subliminally sending us those sinister cult-inducing vibes from up there on the silver screen.

But he’s not. He’s having fun being Roy Miller. (He has an aka, too. I believe it might be “Knight.”)

Roy Miller needs a patsy, so he hones in on June Havens (Cameron Diaz), who’s bumbling around the airport trying to get to her sister’s wedding. They bump into each other (the kind of encounter that secret agents are prone to precipitate) and Havens—and c’mon, her name should have been June Day; I mean who dropped the ball on that one?—is quickly thrown into Miller’s lethal world of secrets and lies and of suddenly dead bad guys.

Thus the spoof is on, and anyone at this point unable to see the farce through the trees is probably sitting in the wrong movie. (After powdering her nose in a jetliner ’s tiny lav, Havens emerges to find all the passengers dead, while a suave and slightly out-of-breath Miller tells her he may have to land the plane because the pilots are dead, too. C’mon, that only happens once or twice a year in real life.)

Formula? Yes. But formula with wit, with character, with charm—which is really the only difference between a good formula film and bad formulaic pap.

In “Knight and Day” I’m just too content enjoying the ride to worry about semantics, worry about if I’m having fun or not. The Cruise/Diaz chemistry factor is up there in the giddy ozone, and every five minutes we’re in another country, shooting things up or crunching cars or bickering about the aforementioned quandaries.

In other words, “Knight and Day” is just a lot of well-dialogued, gleamy-toothed, goofy, kinetic fun. And if that means a bad movie, I guess I’m in the wrong business.