Geena Davis and Renny Harlin were married, so he put her in his movies. The first one was Cutthroat Island from 1995, which was a bomb. The second film he made with her was an action thriller titled The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), which co-starred Samuel L. Jackson. Unlike Harlin's previous film, this one featured a strong script by Shane Black.
While everything seemed promising, the film ended up underperforming at the box office. Some people think the bad taste Cutthroat Island (an even bigger bomb) left on the audience was another factor as to why Long Kiss performed rather underwhelmingly. However, it gained an audience over the years and now has a cult following.
Samantha Caine (Geena Davis), a woman with amnesia, gets her life changed when she hires a private investigator (Samuel L. Jackson) in order to find out about her own past. This uncovers and brings out of the shadows her former rivals and puts her life, and her family's, in severe danger. However, Samantha slowly regains past abilities she had forgotten about that will allow her to fight for her loved ones and discover all she had wiped from her memory.
Long Kiss is a highly entertaining flick that delivers the goods and manages to engage you with it's likable characters, strong writing and constant stimulation through action. It features the witty dialogue that you would expect from Shane Black, sometimes with very unnatural results. You will also find some very quirky and slightly comedic sequences that might feel a bit odd, like when Samantha discovers some of her assassin training while cooking, which isnt a bad moment, it's actually sort of inventive.
I will say that it's more than just action, it stablishes and develops quite efficiently the conflicts and dramatic weight of the story. As with many Shane Black movies, and most of Renny Harlin movies, there are a lot of exagerated elements along with some somewhat low key ones. There's always a clash in styles. Sometimes you are watching a scene that might fit among the first two Lethal Weapon movies, and the next one you are watching a heavily stylized scene that increases it's unreality (the hallucinations, the cartoonish villains). Its a bit jarring but it also keeps things interesting.
In that vein, the action itself seems perfectly grounded in paper, but when you see it executed you see people flying around and stuff blowing up in people's faces without any real consequences. If you were to simply laid out a description of the action scenes then it makes perfect sense but Harlin wanted to turn it into something greatly exagerated and almost ridiculous. Its like Nikita (1990) by the way of Stephen Chow (maybe not THAT crazy but close to it).
Samantha is a main character that surprises you, especially at the beginning. The script gives you left turns and reveals things that you might not be expecting, from contradicting a superfitial characterization to humorous surprises just for comedy sake and Samantha a part of that, but it sort of gets turned into a very normal "assassin with no memory ofher past living a normal life now" type of premise. Could have been worse, I will say this is certainly among the top examples of such plots. She struggles constantly between her motherly sweetness and deadly killer instincts, a good conflict for her character to face against, which ends up wrapping up very nicely during the climax.
Speaking of the climax, that's a huge highlight, very reminiscent of the first two Die Hard movies but compacted into just one explosive (literally) sequence. Again, it's yet another Harlinesque spectacle that has very little realism when it comes the explosions and some physics but makes it up with very solidly constructed sequences, shot by shot, it's all perfectly timed and directed.
Completely recommended for anyone with any type of appreciation for action movies and who really enjoy smart and well made action blockbusters. I kind of get the sense that Renny Harlin is probably an unsung hero of the 90's era of female action cinema, between this and Cutthroat Island, he gave us two mainstream efforts.
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