Review of The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) by Alan Z — 02 Mar 2009

I loved this movie when I was in the fifth grade. Now, however, I am an adult. When I was ten, this actioner was so much fun, larger than life. And indeed, the first half is a wonderfully implausible meeting of the most entirely different worlds. We have a suburban mother and schoolteacher with a seemingly normal life in Pennsylvania. She hires sleazy, divorced urban New Jersey ex-convict private investigator Samuel L. Jackson to help her find the truth about her past. She's really an assassin for the CIA who went missing eight years ago, her true identity which emerges when she's captured and tortured by some of her old enemies. Characters are always passing through settings that are wildly unlikely places in which we would see them. A vicious one-eyed killer barges into our heroine's cookie cutter provincial home, totally ridiculous action sequences bursting out in a mall and in the picturesque country, both settings soon counterpointed by gritty, gaudy New Jersey and other urban areas.

But the last half is badly paced Hollywood action contrivance, making its silliness almost unbearable. She discovers that her former boss at the CIA has allied with a psychotic ops specialist in a false flag plot to detonate a chemical bomb in downtown Niagara Falls, frame Islamic terrorists for the crime, and thus secure more funding. This doesn't sound so bad in and of itself, but take for instance the ops specialist. True to the film's spirit, he is ironically characterized as a sparkling-toothed, clean-cut young pretty boy. This could've been a novel way of making his character even more evil, but this is instead part of what pushes the movie's sideways nod at us in concurrence with its self-deprecating cash-in formula over the cliff. He find ourselves so conscious of hating him that we realize that we don't hate him because he's such an evil villain. We hate him because he does so many vile things with the obvious casting of someone who looks so incapable of being so evil. There is no way of grasping why he does what he does. Once characters like him begin to show up, Shane Black's snappy dialogue comes to feel all the more of a detachment.

Nevertheless, the best thing about the movie is its often corny but vastly funny dialogue, which could fuel a whole night of stand-up routines or barroom boys' night out bickering, with razor-sharp witticisms like, "You couldn't hit a lake if you were standing on the bottom," "A woman's face never looks quite so beautiful as when it's distended in pain. Witness the beauty of childbirth," and "The dog's been licking his anus for the last three straight hours. I should think that whatever he is attempting to dislodge is either gone for good, or there to stay." The villain surreptitiously brandishes a knife to a woman and her kids: "You're about to have 2.4 children." In a perilous situation, Charlie's daughter asks her if she's going to die. Charlie has an almost self-spoofing way of comforting her: "Oh, no, baby, no. You're not going to die. They are. Cover your ears. Hey, should we get a dog?" Perhaps my favorite is during a fight in which one character has a compact razor knife. The opponent says, "Oh, honey, only four inches?" "You'll feel me.".

Alas, it's the kind of movie where when a mother endures a personality change and decides she does love her little daughter when all is said and done, she cries, "I LOVE HER!'' over the commotion of violence. Davis and Jackson actually outrun a flaming fireball that chases them down a corridor.

One particular explosion breeds yet another in a sea of samples of the contemporary way in which action movies eliminate huge, elementary and unwarranted gaps in the laws of physics. Davis and Jackson indeed escape a flaming fireball that chases them down a tunnel. This is a convention shared by so many fellow 1990s action pictures. This one, however, does it twice. Yes, and the climax concerns, apparently, in its flurry of machine-gun-speed editing of shots that are more coverage that cinematography, a truck bomb that is to blow up a bridge, and at one point Davis in fact uses a dead body as a counterweight to lift her into the sky so she can unload on a helicopter under an archway that says "Welcome to Canada.".

At any rate, Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson determine that they're dauntless here, as Jackson in particular always is, as they exchange their droll jeers and cheeky puns in the intervals flanked by special effects sequences. And the action is basically what we want going in: extravagant, noisy and brutal. As an R-rated movie about torture, limitless body count and terrorism, the target audience is likely not boys in the fifth grade. I admired it for its unusually self-reflexive irony, which I frankly also admired in another Shane Black project from the '90s, Last Action Hero, but in order not to feel wasted by the exhaustive emptiness of it, either one has to be a fifth grade boy or someone with such a boundless sense of escapism that they've not passed over their inner fifth grade boy. I must've.