The Long Kiss Goodnight Directed by Geena Davis' husband. Starring Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson. Cameo by Larry King. Reviewed by Michael A. Turton. Dissed by everybody.
In the tradition of _Attack of the Killer Tomatoes_, sailing the course set by _Cutthroat Island_, comes _The Long Kiss Goodnight_, a movie so bad it is absolutely enjoyable. Laugh yourself silly over this disaster which scores a perfect "0" in every category -- plot, acting, directing, editing, you name it, all bad. Of course, if you take movies at all seriously, you may not like this bomb.
The idea (I won't use the word 'story') behind TLKG is that a plain schoolteacher and single mother named Samantha Caine, who is suffering from amnesia, is really a government assassin who is suffering an episode of madness, hiding inside a fake identity, apparently to escape the burdens of killing. A (hugely predictable) car accident and a smack on the head bring forth the old identity. As Samantha Caine goes in search of her past in the company of a private detective she has employed, Mitch (Samuel L. Jackson) she happens to resurface just when her (unnamed) old agency is staging a fake terrorist attack on the town of Niagara Falls (code named Operation Honeymoon) to drum up support for funding in Congress. The result is a blizzard of ever more impossible and incredible events until the mind reaches a state wherein the critical faculty ceases to operate in a serious mode and laughter is the only possible response.
How to sum up TLKG in a single sentence? Suffice to say: in what other flick can you hear the phrase "blithering idiot" uttered with complete earnestness? I can't say when the last time was I enjoyed a movie so much. There were places where I laughed myself to tears.
Foremost among the movie's galaxy of failure is the acting. Except for a strong performance from the newcomer playing the urbanely psychotic Timothy and Samuel L. Jackson, whose emotional outbursts seem like the flailing of a man drowning in quicksand, everyone in TLKG has clearly studied at the Wooden Indian Academy of Self-Expression. The smirking, leaden delivery of Geena Davis would drive Trek's Data mad with envy. The professor who trained her is a gem of bad acting working with an awful script, a cornucopia of pompous nonsense poured out at lightspeed.
Plot and script meanwhile are a miracle of self-conscious silliness. Bad line follows bad line in orderly procession as though saved up for the occasion (although here and there a good line pops out like a struggling hand poking through the surface of a swamp). The plot is a crystalline derivative of everything that is objectionable about Hollywood, including the obligatory self-sacrificing former jailbird who sustains serious injury in saving Our Hero, the daughter who begs mom not to give up, the urbane psycho, the nervous government officials in a rogue agency, the nice but stupid boyfriend as well as the mandatory guns with endless ammo and characters who perform superhuman feats of strength with various parts of the body out of commission. Of course, it takes place at Christmas. Of course nobody dies at the end and all families are reconstituted. Of course there is only one black man, who is of course a former jailbird and divorced. Being a Minority, he of course is endowed with Primitive Wisdom which enables Samantha to recognize her True self.
As if cliches weren't bad enough, implausibilities and continuity failures abound. How does a woman with no past get hired as a schoolteacher? What happened to the man who was trapped in the burning car when Samantha has her accident? Why do the government agents choose to make a hit on Samantha by using automatic weapons in the middle of a crowded train station? How did Samantha and Mitch get out of the phone company after taking everyone there hostage? Where are they at the end? I could go on in this vein, but I'm sure the reader gets the picture.
The directing and editing are in no way inferior to the acting, plot and script. Characters constantly undergo dimensional shift as they reposition themselves in badly-edited shots. Some shots are visually incomprehensible, especially the scene of Samantha lying in the snow with the dead deer. The action in this movie must be seen to not be believed. My personal favorite: while sitting in a chair, Mitch is blown out of a second-story window in an explosion, blown through a neon sign, lands in a tree, falls into a snowbank, and gets up immediately to throw a knife through an attacker's throat. All in a day's work for our hero.
There's no question that this could have been a great movie. Under another director's tutelage Davis might actually have been able to pull off an action hero, but she lacks real bite. Her sluttishness is an obvious act, her menace comes off as mere irritation. The potentially compelling conflict between her submerged identity and her assumed one could have been interesting, but comes off as cliched. The fake terrorist attack was a tactic contemplated to undermine Castro in the '60s, but there is no link here to real government policies, so the government agents are purely stick figures. One yearns for the energy and dark genius of a Tim Burton.
The most fascinating question is: what idiot funded this clunker? I suppose "profound lack of judgement" must have become a job requirement for suits these days. 0 out of 5: don't see, don't rent, don't even watch the trailer.
Copyright 1998 by Michael A. Turton
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