The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

Very Cool!!!

Simply Perfect

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I saw all of the Bourne Identity movies and enjoyed every one of them. However this movie, I am afraid beats all of them. Geena Davis should have received an Oscar for her performance in this one. But how in the world did the makers of this movie allow for the Bourne series to rip off this movie big time.....? Amnesiac assassin comes back with all skills intact and weirds out the ones who trained and equipped her. What in the world was the difference except a better plot? I did not think that Geena Davis could do this but she did. I recently saw a League of Their Own with my wife and She and I enjoyed it and then I saw this one and I was completely surprised with this edge of the seat performance and plot.please comment on this folks...please? I know the writer got 3 million dollars for this but come on fair is fair.Thank you.

Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) is a suburban teacher married to Hal (Tom Amandes) with a daughter. She suffered amnesia 8 years ago and has been hiring private detectives. However after so many years, she's down to the cheap unscrupulous Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) and his assistant Trin (Melina Kanakaredes). Parts of her old personality starts to seep through after a car accident. Her name was Charly Baltimore and she was a skilled government assassin. People from her past starts coming back to kill her. Timothy (Craig Bierko) finds out that she's still alive and starts tracking her down as well as many others who would rather have her dead. Mitch uncovers a treasure trove of her past which she uses to call Dr. Nathan Waldman (Brian Cox).I love the idea of this movie. Shane Black has written some interesting hard boiled movies. I'm not as in love with director Renny Harlin's execution. The movie also bogs down with too many bad guys with too complicated of a story. The action is OK and there's lots of it. Davis and Jackson need to have better chemistry. I think Davis is a little too off-putting and angry. This movie has its moments but other movies with similar stories have been done better.

1996's The Long Kiss Goodnight was the second movie in a row that director Renny Harlin made with his then-wife Geena Davis. Davis played a pirate in the previous year's Cutthroat Island. Harlin previously directed The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Die Hard 2 which were edited simultaneously and released just a week apart. Die Hard 2 was a huge hit and Ford Fairlane starred Andrew Dice Clay. Harlin started his career by directing Finland's most expensive film and the slashers Prison and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. The screenplay was written by action movie pioneer Shane Black who also wrote Lethal Weapon, Lethal Weapon 2, The Last Boy Scout and The Last Action Hero. Alan Silvestri composed the Original Music and the Cinematography was by Guillermo Navarro.There are rumours and rumours of rumours that a sequel to Renny Harlin's The Long Kiss Goodnight is in the works. I inexplicably missed the original when it came out and dismissed it as just another action flick. I was more than surprised at how prescient a movie it was at the time. The nineties was an adventurous time for filmmaking. Increasingly influenced by music videos, a lot of the art showed dark overtones, in bright colours and quick cuts. Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs brought a sense of low-budget high-octane fun and breakaway banter back into the movies. He also expanded on the naturalistic acting styles in Barry Levinson's conversational film Diner that let everyday small talk happen while allowing the plot to move along as it might. On the surface, The Long Kiss Goodnight is a fast-paced adventure movie with a quick wit, an accelerating pace, famous locations, and a female hero that performs too many impossible physical feats. Underneath it is an allegory to the growing paranoiac conspiracy theories that are now flooding into the mainstream. The movie references the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Samantha Caine's transformation into the regrettably-named Charly Baltimore can be seen as an allusion to sleeper-agent multiple personality assassins.

Hollywood's favorite spy plot in the post-Cold War era has ultra-secret agencies trying to justify their mission by fabricating new villains to replace the Soviets. In director Renny Harlin's high-octane actioneer "The Long Kiss Goodbye," Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson, the Central Intelligence Agency fakes a terrorist attack at Niagara Falls so Congress won't slash its budget. What the CIA doesn't count on is the return of one of its top assassins, long-believed lifeless, who doesn't take anything lying down. New Line Cinema has cast the "Thelma & Louise" star as New England school teacher Samantha Caine who suffers from amnesia. Eight years earlier, she washed up on the New Jersey coast two months pregnant without a clue to her own identity. Since then she has paid a number of private eyes to recover her memory. When the CIA learns that she is still alive and breathing, the company dispatches a gang of assassins. Meanwhile, sleazy private eye Mitch Henessey ((Samuel L. Jackson of "Pulp Fiction") is a detective who specializes in blackmail. He has found traces of Samantha's past when she was Charlene Baltimore.Scenarist Shane Black, who wrote "Lethal Weapon" (1987) and "The Last Boy Scout" (1991) and more recently "Iron Man 3," penned a trim but improbable screenplay that neatly knits together all the loose ends and packs one hell of a wallop. The dialogue crackles with blasphemous irreverence. Finnish helmer Renny Harlin ("Cliffhanger" and "Die Hard 2: Die Harder") shows that he still has the knack when it comes to orchestrating knock-out action scenes. Harlin and Black kiss off any sense of credibility as their protagonists survive too many crashes and look too cool riddling the bad guys with bullets. Davis acquits herself well as the super-heroine in a gender reversal of James Bond. This is the kind of free-for-all, tongue-in-cheek action epic that media watchdogs like to condemn for its cartoon violence and inappropriate behavior. When Caine becomes Charlie Baltimore, she spews profanities of the worst sort, laps up liquor like ice water and puffs on tobacco cigarettes like a chimney. If you're tired of cooking and watching men destroy the planet, "The Long Kiss Goodnight" is just the kind of rollicking nonsense to set your sights on when you're looking for something memorable with lots of audacious combat sequences. The scene where our heroine is strapped to a water wheel is terrific. Craig Bierko and David Morse make venomous villains. "The Long Kiss Goodnight" never wears out its welcome and it ranks as one of Geena Davis' best action flicks.