“Staff Picks” is a deeper look into movies that we love here at Video CULTure. Each edition of this column will focus on a single film that we think you should check out, either for the first time or for a long-overdue revisit.
By Patrick Bartlett (Twitter: @alleywaykrew)
Shane Black is my hero. I have made absolutely no secret of that fact. I love his work. Every bit of it. Even the ones that most people are lukewarm (at best) on. That being said, for quite a while, I did not like “The Long Kiss Goodnight”. I honestly don’t even remember why. I guess I just didn’t vibe with it at the time that I discovered his work? Either way, after a while, I devoured everything else and I wanted more. For that reason, I decided to give it another chance after a few years of praise from friends whose taste I respected and shared in many ways. I’m so glad that I did. Doing a double feature of this and my beloved (and other Shane Black joint) “Lethal Weapon” is one of the moments that I most look forward to when it’s time to watch Christmas movies every year.
Looking at it now, I kind of understand why “The Long Kiss Goodnight” didn’t blow up the box office in 1996 like a tanker truck with a bomb attached to it. It’s such an anomaly of a movie. It’s something that essentially had to come out exactly the moment it did but still manages to feel like a movie out of time in a very specific way. Its ludicrously over the top action could only exist in a time where the envelope had been pushed so far that it was practically dangling over the edge. At the same time, it still feels like an outlier. This is due in no small part to the fact that fused with said ludicrous action is a decidedly self-referential ’90s sensibility that had recently been ushered in by independent filmmakers like Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino. The final product is something that is kind of a perfect amalgamation of writer Shane Black and director Renny Harlin’s shockingly complementary sensibilities.
I’ll get back to the filmmakers in a moment but for those that haven’t seen it and want to know what it’s about, I feel like if you’ve already made it this far, you’ve earned that much. Essentially, a woman named Samantha Caine (played by Geena Davis) woke up from a catatonic state 8 years ago, pregnant, with no memory of her life before that moment. She’s mostly moved on, working as a schoolteacher, raising her daughter with a perfectly fine fellow that she’s engaged to. She’s mostly given up on private investigators or anyone else finding out who she really is (or who she was) but the latest P.I., former dirty cop and ex-convict Mitch Hennessy (Samuel L. Jackson’s personal favorite role) ends up finally unearthing something that puts them on a path towards finding out the truth. That happens in the nick of time too, since her past was actually so much darker than she could have ever expected and her former associates, assuming her dead previously …well, they’ve started closing in on her as well.
Geena Davis is one of the most underrated actors of the era and her performance in “The Long Kiss Goodnight” is one of my two favorites from her (pretty definitely my actual favorite of the two though. Sorry “The Fly.”). There is so much truly wonderful actual acting to be done in her role(s) in addition to being a believable absolute badass. She does more than was ever really asked for from anyone else leading an action film of the time. The fact that she pulls everything off as well as she does is why it will forever irritate me about the speculation of the film having a female lead being the cause of it not being as successful as it could have been. The film would just not work without her. Having said that, I mentioned earlier that his role as Mitch Hennessy is Sam Jackson’s favorite of his career and it’s hard to watch this film and not understand why. I honestly have no idea what my favorite role of his could possibly be with so many great choices but Mitch is up there. Jackson makes Mitch incredibly sympathetic and hilariously funny in a way that allows him to completely own his role as almost a second lead to Geena Davis when he could have just as easily been a mildly amusing sidekick. There isn’t a single weak link in the cast, though. Weirdly enough, even the tiniest roles here are generally played by instantly recognizable and respected actors like Brian Cox and David Morse. I do feel like Craig Bierko needs to be singled out though. No one seems to call out his performances the way he deserves, so I’m more than happy to. In a film overflowing with great actors, Bierko still manages to steal the film with his villainous role. He’s believably menacing while not having a single moment where he isn’t radiating charm and injecting chaotic energy into the proceedings. The fact that “The Long Kiss Goodnight” didn’t make him a superstar is perhaps the film’s greatest tragedy.
Speaking of chaotic energy, it’s time to talk about Renny Harlin. I didn’t really get it at the time (as I was a child) but there really was something special about Harlin’s ’80s and ’90s work. It owes as much to music videos, comic books, and video games as it does to anything in traditional cinema. The final product of the majority of his stuff from this era is positively brimming with energy that leaps off the screen. He creates imagery that is instantly iconic and indelibly etched onto the conscious and subconscious of anyone watching his work. It makes me understand why he kept getting work even when his movies weren’t super successful. Shane Black was certainly successful though. He sold the script for this film in 1996 for a record $4 million dollars, topping the almost $2 million he received for his previous screenplay for “The Last Boy Scout” and it’s hard to not understand why. With dialogue and characters as spectacular as its set pieces, it really makes no sense that something like that or “The Long Kiss Goodnight” wouldn’t be huge payoffs for any studio tripping over themselves to make it …except for that simple fact I’ve mentioned in some my previous articles: the ’90s were a weird goddamn time for genre cinema.
In the end, while I’m sure it’s not anything resembling comforting for anyone on the studio level who greenlit “The Long Kiss Goodnight”, the fact that it may not have been the biggest box office success at the time yet it’s become so closely held as a cult film in addition to being a bonafide Christmas classic is still something that everyone involved should be incredibly proud of. I have no idea what my problem (or society’s) was when I first saw it but I am clearly now part of the aforementioned cult that holds this film so close to their hearts. I can’t imagine anyone that’s into action movies checking this out and not finding a new favorite to watch alongside stuff like “Lethal Weapon” and “Die Hard” around Christmas time. It’s as much pure delight as one could possibly hope for in terms of action cinema.
To find out where this film is available to stream, click here: Just Watch