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The Long Kiss Goodnight
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you crossed Martha Stewart with Officer John McClane, The Long Kiss Goodnight will give you a pretty good indication. Add in Samuel L. Jackson as a bumbling detective who fails to do anything right and you’ve got a pretty decent film on your hands.
The Long Kiss Goodnight follows the story of Samantha Cane/Charlene Baltimore (Geena Davis) as she comes to terms with her past life prior to being a schoolteacher/housewife when she starts regaining her memory after having “focal retrograde amnesia.” Basically she can’t remember anything that happened more than eight years before we meet her. I know what you’re thinking, this all sounds like some ultraboring chick flick. It’s not.
It turns out that the boring housewife used to be a governmental assassin who now has to complete her mission by thwarting the plot to kill thousands of people using a chemical bomb in a truck. Sounds like a recipe for much dodginess, and it is.
Dodginess
The Long Kiss Goodnight is actually pretty standard action fair, and is only as memorable as it is because of Geena Davis. The transformation from housewife to assassin and from there to a strange sort of amalgamation of the two, coupled with Samuel L Jackson’s ineptness manages to score this one a 4 on the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man scale. The dodgiest moment is quite hard to pinpoint, but I’m going to have to give it to the first time we get an inkling that the adorable housewife has a dark and twisty side when in a real “Why is the rum gone?” moment she breaks the neck of a deer she hit with the car. Unexpected, yes, foreshadowing of awesomeness, most definitely.
Rewatchability Rating
Gunfights, explosions and humour all meld relatively seamlessly into an IQ reducing light show that answers the question about what a female John McClane would look and act like. There is a plot, which, is a little twisty, as one would expect in an amnesia related film, but not so twist that you have to engage your brain at any point. The Long Kiss Goodnight scores a respectable 4 on the rewatchability index.
Most Memorable Quote
There are a number of quotes that could have been used here, one about a dog’s propensity for licking itself, one about life and pain and getting used to it, and one about the bad guy dying screaming, but Samuel L Jackson once again steps up and proves that even though his character is mildly incompetent, he’s still a bad-ass with this gem. “I will see to it you spend the next ten years in prison getting ass-fucked. If the case is thrown out 'cause my arrest was too violent, I will personally hire men to ass-fuck you for ten years.”
Final Thoughts
The Long Kiss Goodnight has a large number of things going for it, and it’ll go well as part of any action movie marathon. If you’re looking for a trio of action films to watch for a pizza, beer and movie night, putting The Long Kiss Goodnight together with Die Hard and Bad Boys is pretty much guaranteed to leave you screaming Yippee Ki Yay at the end of it.