Review of The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) by Blake B — 15 Sep 2010

A pretty mediocre actioner that I enjoyed much more when I was younger. Geena Davis is pretty uneven when she turns into a badass. She's sometimes incredibly cool and other times annoying and unconvincing. Believe it or not, this is one of my favorite Samuel L. Jackson movies. I've always felt the more screen time that he gets in a movie, the better for everyone. I don't like when he gets put into his usual character actor roles where he gets MAYBE five minutes of screen time (Kill Bill Vol. 2 and Jurassic Park immediately come to mind). So I liked seeing him so much in The Long Kiss Goodnight. He's just so cool and quick with intelligent, funny dialogue (Pulp Fiction most aptly used Jackson's way with words) that he elevates the movie at times when it's close to becoming boring.

The plot is not as interesting as the movie thinks it is, mainly because the twists are pretty easy to figure out and nothing "revealed" about Davis' past is very surprising. The more I think about it, the more The Long Kiss Goodnight seems like a knockoff of the Kill Bill saga, and I say that knowing full well The Long Kiss Goodnight got here first. But where Tarantino has complete scenes devoted to The Bride's (and Oren Ishii's) backstory, The Long Kiss Goodnight has a couple of ten to twenty second flashbacks that reveal nothing about Davis' character before the amnesia hit, and we are left to kind of imagine the kind of badass she used to be before she got mixed up in the head with middle-class housewifedom. What I'm basically saying is that Davis' character has all the makings of being just as interesting, cool, and badass as The Bride, but there's less time devoted to Davis and more time wasted on the uninteresting plot. There was a lot of potential with this movie and Davis' character that I think went untapped.

A quick side note here: Do writers who insert the line "Suck my d*ck" into a woman's mouth understand how unintentionally hilarious it sounds? That certainly doesn't make me think this is a badass talking. It makes me think that perhaps in her pre-amnesia days she may have had a little "minor" surgery. Is that really where the writer's want me to go? I think only in GI Jane did this ever work, and it still sounded a little ridiculous.

Thanks to Jackson's performance and the competent action scenes, The Long Kiss Goodnight is enjoyable enough, but might leave you wishing for more.