Film Review
Kiss 'Goodnight' goodbye
By David FriedeStaff Writer
In "The Long
Kiss Goodnight," Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) is like any ordinary
housewife--normal enough to be a grade-school teacher. In fact, she happens
to be a grade-school teacher. She only exhibits one minor
quirk--she suffers from amnesia and therefore cannot remember anything that
happened more that eight years ago. This doesn't seem to bother her
anymore--she has a new life she's perfectly happy with. Then her memory starts
coming back in pieces as she feverishly minces some unsuspecting carrots.
Samantha suddenly remembers that she used to be a deadly spy named Charly
Baltimore, a revelation that inspires her to swear like a trucker, dye her
hair yellow and blow things up real good. And--wouldn't you know it?--her
former government employers are now trying to kill her. But not if Charly and her
detective sidekick Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) can help it. Violence
and profanity ensue.As the film progresses, it
became quite obvious that director Renny Harlin and his star are married.
They seemed to be paying too much attention to each other, and therefore
completely ignored the quality of the film in question. In "The Long Kiss
Goodnight," he constructs the action with virtually no flair and directs
his leading lady into a humorously terrible performance. He's a director
who doesn't nearly earn his self-imposed "reputation."Renny Harlin could only do
so much damage to this film, because at its core it really belongs to the
$4 million man, screenwriter Shane Black. This is where the real
disappointment lies. Unlike the action in his
other scripts, such as "Lethal Weapon" and "The Last Boy Scout," that of
"The Long Kiss Goodnight" is not intense, but merely preposterous and
frighteningly unoriginal. Watch for a sequence involving an 18-wheeler that
is ripped off--shot for shot--from "Terminator 2." In its ludicrousness, this
film looks a lot more like the Black-scripted "The Last Action Hero," but
with one major difference. Whereas Arnold's film was an intentional spoof
(and a brilliant one, at that), this film earns its laughs unintentionally
and painfully. Speaking of humor, "Long
Kiss" contains the usual Shane Black-ian comedic element, but this time
around, it is far too pseudo-Tarantino. With the exception of the
sporadically amusing Samuel L. Jackson, this film basically falls on its
face.Overall, "The Long Kiss
Goodnight" is an example of a mediocre-at-best script made even worse by
incompetent direction. It is the kind of film
where the sound effects are so loud that they cover up the fact that
nothing interesting is happening. Instead of the crackerjack thriller the
ads promise, "Long Kiss" turns out to be a headache-inducing, boring mess.
D"The Long Kiss Goodnight" opens Friday in wide release.