Last week the DH and I watched Knight and Day. Or rather, the DH watched it. I made it about a third of the way through, at which point I found Cameron Diaz’s character so annoying that I walked out of the room. She seemed to have possibilities at first—she restored classic cars and was traveling with some vintage parts in her carry-on. But then the movie lurched into the hand-to-hand combat part of the plot (Tom Cruise is a spy, Diaz is an innocent bystander who gets swept up in his plots, yadda yadda), and I couldn’t take it.

You see, she’s a screamer.

We all know screamers of course. They’re the female characters who react to every threat by shrieking in the hero’s ear, sometimes ducking and covering at the same time. They’re useless in a crisis, and they tend to whine when provoked. At one point, Cruise handed Diaz an AK-47 to defend herself. I turned to the hubs and said, “Just watch. She’s going to pull the trigger and the recoil is going to make her jump around and the gun is going to fire wildly in all directions.” Which is precisely what happened next. Damn, I’m good. But the movie wasn’t.

Here’s the thing: I don’t really demand Angelina Jolie in a cat suit, but I do like my heroines to be at least minimally competent. Even though they’re being thrown into a scary situation, I’d like them to cope (okay, I probably wouldn’t cope myself, but I expect heroines to behave better than I do under pressure).

My role model for how a heroine should behave in these kinds of situations is Sandra Bullock in Speed. Her character, Annie, doesn’t end up in the driver’s seat because she’s a superheroine; she ends up there because the bus driver’s been shot and somebody has to keep the bus from smashing into something. But once she’s there, she drives that bus like a champ. Yes, okay, we know she lost her license for speeding, but that’s not the kind of thing that qualifies you to keep a speeding bus under sixty while the hero tries to figure out the next step. And she doesn’t scream either.

The DH tells me that Cameron’s character pulled herself together later in the movie and did a good job driving her GTO, but by then I was long gone. The bottom line is this: there’s no way I’m sticking around for a screamer. In fact, if I were the hero, I’d drop her on the nearest street corner and head for the hills. After all, there’s no point in hauling around somebody who threatens your ear drums at every tight spot and who apparently has no useful skills beyond the ability to snivel attractively. Granted, she looks cute in a pair of jeans, but is that really enough? Generations of teenage boys may say yeah, but I beg to disagree. I prefer somebody who can drive the freakin’ bus without a scream to be heard.