THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(New Line) Starring: Geena Davis, Samuel L. Jackson, Patrick Malahide, Craig Bierko, Brian Cox, David Morse. Screenplay: Shane Black. Producers: Renny Harlin, Stephanie Austin, Shane Black. Director: Renny Harlin. MPAA Rating: R (violence, profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 119 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
It is easy for me to understand the reasoning which pegged Shane Black's script for THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT as worth $4 million, because it includes all the elements which tend to make studio executives soil themselves in anticipation. A high concept premise, plenty of gratuitous violence, a little T&A, buddies exchanging profane one-liners, really big explosions...these are the stuff of blockbusters, my friends. They are also the stuff of inane, incoherent garbage, unlikely to gain any style points with inane, incoherent garbagemeister Renny Harlin (CUTTHROAT ISLAND) at the helm. The thing is that THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is a difficult film to dismiss, because it is just as often entertaining as it is actively infuriating. As inane, incoherent garbage goes, it's really not that bad.
Geena Davis stars as Samantha Caine, a small town Pennsylvania schoolteacher with a large hole in her life. Eight years earlier she woke up on a beach pregnant and with no recollection of her previous life, and has since become a simple working mother while detectives failed to provide any clues to her identity. But Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) manages to succeed where others did not, and finds names which may help fill in the blanks. It turns out that Samantha might not like what she finds, as she learns that she was a government-trained assassin named Charley Baltimore, and that she has plenty of enemies who are not at all pleased to find her alive. She also has friends, but the trick is figuring out who they are before someone erases her memory for good.
Harlin tried to turn wife Geena Davis into an action heroine in CUTTHROAT ISLAND, and the result was the biggest financial disaster in the history of the cinema. Apparently that was not enough to shake his conviction that Davis had the right stuff, and THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT sort of proves him right. There is something strangely satisfying about watching Davis turn into a killing machine, while partner Jackson (as the down-on-his-luck gumshoe who usually does the ass-kicking in such films) generally looks on ineffectually. It's primitive role-reversal stuff, but it works; it's a great bit of business when hausfrau Samantha takes a pie she has just baked in a Pyrex dish and uses it to beat in the head of an assailant. Jackson also gets a handful of simplistic but very funny gag lines, and even a line in which he makes fun of making up gag lines. It would be over-estimating the subtlety of THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT to refer to it as a satire, but its bending of conventions often works quite well.
At other times, it is about as conventional as action film-making gets, and distressingly brutal. There is a sequence early in the film involving a deer hit by a car which will raise plenty of hackles, and it provides an appropriate prelude to numerous scenes of torture, disturbing fantasy/dream sequences and plenty of good old-fashioned shootings and stabbings. Harlin and Black also play unfair with the tired device of a child in distress, and manage to play plenty of bodily functions for gags along the way. Into the middle of this rather crude mess they then drop half-hearted attempts at character development, with Davis' discovery resulting in a split personality and Jackson trying to redeem himself for something or other. For four million bucks, I suppose Shane Black figured he might as well throw in the kitchen sink.
Yet I can't deny that THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT made me laugh, and that there was never a time when I was bored. Yes, villains appear and disappear with scarcely a thought to explaining who they are or why they matter. Yes, it is overloaded and overblown in a way which can make anyone who cares about good movies cringe. Yes, it is sometimes becomes so violent as to be off-putting. THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is an exploitation film, but it is an exploitation film with a sense of its own absurdity. You may not care at all about Mitch Henessey as a person, but you will probably find yourself enjoying his exasperated delivery of Black's crude humor; you may not really believe Charley Baltimore _is_ a person, but you might still find her exploits a guilty pleasure. THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is an easy film to like, and equally easy to hate. What else can you say when you walk away from an inane, incoherent piece of garbage with a smile on your face?
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 femme fatalities: 6.
--
Receive Scott Renshaw's reviews directly via email from Marquee!
Visit http://www.marquee.com/marquee-mailinglists.html for details.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage
http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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