There was no sinister motive attached to the knife Pierce Brosnan was caught with a few weeks ago while catching a flight in Vermont – he was simply carrying the potential weapon to assist with his art, he said.

“It wasn’t 10 inches long,” Brosnan told the press at the LA premiere of his film No Escape, which drops this Friday. “I'm a painter, I'm an artist, so I had my pencils. The knife just went into the bag. You want to keep your pencils sharpened.”

Brosnan was nabbed by TSA officials with the tool, and eventually boarded his flight – sans knife – after the misunderstanding was cleared up.

It’s true that Pierce is an avid artist/painter, and he might want to take the knife to another recently released film of his, Some Kind of Beautiful, which was mauled by the critics last week. The alleged romantic comedy co-stars Salma Hayek and Jessica Alba – Pierce plays a college professor who likes to sleep with his students -- and little in the way of publicity was done to herald its release. Given the brutal reviews, that’s not surprising.

“Some Kind of Beautiful is some kind of hideous, a perfect storm of romantic-comedy awfulness that seems to set the ailing genre back decades with the sheer force of its ineptitude,” wrote Variety, while The New York Times in its brief opinion wholeheartedly agreed.

“The execrable romantic comedy Some Kind of Beautiful is the kind of embarrassment a studio dumps into the market in August while hoping no one will notice,” wrote the Times critic, calling Brosnan “flabby” to boot.

Ouch!!!!!!!!!!