The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
A film review by Michael John Legeros
Copyright 1996 Michael John Legeros
(New Line)
Directed by Renny Harlin
Written by Shane Black
Cast Geena Davis, Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Malahide, Craig
Bierko, Brian Cox, David Morse
MPAA Rating "R" (presumably for language and violence)
Running Time 120 minutes
Reviewed at Mission Valley Cinemas, Raleigh, NC (5OCT96)
==
THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is my favorite bad movie of the year, even better than BARB WIRE, DIABOLIQUE, or, dare I say the name?, MARY REILLY. Sure, it's as fowl as any turkey of times past, but this mega-million dollar Renny Harlin-Geena Davis-Shane Black bomb is never off-putting. That is to say, it's awful fun. The major misstep is the casting of Mrs. Renny Harlin as an amnesiac house- wife who awakens one day to discover that she's really a former anti-assassin for the U.S. Government. Geena Davis has the pumped- up physique and, yes, the same wide-eyed exuberance that passed for characterization in CUTTHROAT ISLAND. What's missing, though, is the *steel* behind the sheen. You just don't believe that she wants to kick your ass. (Memo to Mr. Harlin: in the interest of preserving not one but two careers, please stop attempting to cast your wife as an action hero. She's about as well-suited to that role as Demi Moore is at playing strippers. Just. don't. do it.)
Compounding the confounding is a story structure that reveals her secret at the very beginning of the movie, I mean RIGHT THERE IN THE OPENING CREDITS. (Arrive late? No problem! The filmmakers also include a scene or two or three of the bad guys getting ready to get Geena.) This "tipping of the hand" is a 100-proof mystery- killer-- the audience ends up knowing too much too soon and that knowledge drains the suspense right out of the story. The rest of the movie is reduced to red-stained catch-up, with Harlin trying his hardest to generate the tension that should've been there from the beginning. Instead of intrigue we get pumped-up peril, very little of which excites the way it should: Mommy ambushed at home, Mommy sprayed with bullets in a bus station, Mommy hitting a deer and wrecking the car on her way home from a Christmas party. (Has anyone figured out the purpose of that last scene? Other than the guilty pleasure of seeing someone snap Bambi's neck?)
Thank God for Samuel L. Jackson. His low-rent private dick is the perfect foil to Le Femme Nondescript. In addition to adding some much- needed humanity to the movie, he's the most colorful character in the cast. Tearing into writer Shane Black's delicious dialogue, Jackson walks away with nearly every scene, except when upstaged by Brian Cox (CHAIN REACTION, THE GLIMMER MAN). The original Hannibal Lecter (look it up) submits a priceless monologue about a dog and where it likes to lick itself. (BTW, has anyone transcribed that exchange? Please e-mail, if so.) The Brit is gone before long, but Jackson is on hand for the duration and he's so fun to watch, even when reduced to little more than a spectator to the various explosive set-pieces that get progressively bigger, bolder, and brain-dead. After all, this *is* a movie by Renny Harlin, the guy who directed CLIFFHANGER and DIE HARD 2, which means you can expect a basement explosion that's pretty cool and one whammy of a tanker- truck wreck, with Davis hanging-ten a la Arnold in TERMINATOR 2. The final fireball is the best and almost beats the pyrotechnics in INDEPEDENCE DAY. Not bad for a bad movie.
Grade: D+
-- Mike Legeros Corporate Training SAS Institute Inc, Cary, NC, USA, Earth mailto: legeros@unx.sas.com (w) legeros@pagesz.net (h)
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews