A movie like The Long Kiss Goodnight completes the unofficial decade-long trilogy of Christmas Action Thrillers that began with Lethal Weapon, unseasonably released in the spring of 1987 and continued with Die Hard in the summer of 1988. (Yeah, I know Die Hard 2 takes place on Christmas Eve too, but this is a far better movie. And it co-stars Samuel L. Motherfuckin’ Jackson.)
It’s written by Shane Black, the writer of the first Lethal Weapon, and a filmmaker known to set many of his movies around Christmastime. It’s directed by Renny Harlin, who directed Die Hard 2, but works better here especially since he’s not dealing with the dueling egos of Bruce Willis and Joel Silver. It also stars Geena Davis, who was married to Harlin at the time, and it’s an improvement over their disastrous previous collaboration Cutthroat Island.
Davis plays Samantha Caine, a school teacher who lives in a small-town hamlet in northeastern Pennsylvania. She has a loving boyfriend, Hal (Tom Amendes), and a daughter, Caitlyn (Yvonna Zima). About eight years earlier, Samantha was found washed ashore on a New Jersey beach pregnant with Caitlin but no memory of who she is nor what happened.
She’s settled into the life becoming a schoolteacher. However, I’m sure she would need some type of transcript and certification. Since then, she’s spent whatever money she can afford to pay private detectives to search for any information on her past life. The latest PI she’s hired is Mitch Hennessey (Jackson), who is a former cop and down on his luck pulling scams on cheating husbands with his partner, Trin (Melina Kanakaredes).
Samantha is taped by a news crew being in a Christmas parade that is shown on a TV at a prison where an inmate, One-Eyed Jack (Joseph McKenna), sees it and becomes enraged and busts out to track her down. While she’s coming home from a Christmas party at night, she gets in a car wreck when she hits a deer. The car catches on fire as she’s thrown through the windshield and kills the elderly passenger in her car. But Samantha survives and goes over to snap the neck of the deer which is crying in pain.
Doctors tell her she has a concussion but will be okay. But over time, she soon learns she’s very good at slicing and dicing with knives and is happy because she presumes she was a cook/chef. But One-Eyed Jack shows up to kill her. But she uses great fighting skills to kill him at which Mitch has shown up at her house with new information so she takes off with him.
Mitch also notices a change in Samantha’s behavior. A suitcase that Mitch used to track down leads her to contact Dr. Nathan Waldman (Brian Cox) after some doubt and a huge firefight at a train station, he tells Samantha that her real name is Charlene Elizabeth “Charly” Baltimore. She is a CIA assassin that went missing eight years earlier.
But they don’t know if they can fully trust Dr. Waldman or a man named Luke (David Morse) who she thinks was her fiance. There’s also a psychological operations specialist, Timothy (Craig Bierko), who may have been romantically involved with Samantha/Charly as well as the father of Caitlin.
Like a lot of Black’s scripts, the plot flows easily with hilarious banter between Davis and Jackson. And when Timothy is told One-Eyed Jack saw something on TV that upset him, he responds “It’s Baywatch Nights.” The joke may not fly over the heads of audiences today. But it was a horrid spinoff of the show Baywatch that had more of a science-fiction mystery feel to it. For some reason, it lasted more than one season.
The greatness of Black’s scripts are the way the characters feel more like the cookie-cutter characters other action movie scribes would write. Mitch has a habit of singing everything he’s doing to the tune of Muddy Walters’ “Manish Boy.” And there’s a small detail about Luke that is mentioned in which he has to go urinate sitting down. And Cox, even though it’s a shorter role than what he is mostly known for now, does have a good job of handling Black’s comic dialogue. This shows how he was a perfect addition to the Super Troopers movies as Capt. John O’Hagen.
Bierko manages to make Timothy more than the typical charismatic psychopath. He has no redeeming qualities. And you definitely hate him even at a point where he kidnaps Caitlin and warns a mother at a church watching him he will kill one of her children without hesitation if she says anything. This is mostly due to Black writing him differently. Like Mr. Joshua in Lethal Weapon, he only cares about one human life – his own.
The action scenes are the slam-bam pow-wow type that are so over the top you have to admire the absurdity of them. At one scene, Samantha/Charly and Mitch are running through a corridor to move away from an exploding grenade and they jump out a window as she fires down at the ice in the frozen lake below. (In real life, grenades don’t have that much explosive power. They’re used to blow shrapnel in all directions. Later she uses a makeshift pulley to fly up through the air to grab a dead henchman’s submachine gun to shoot at the other bad guys.
The title is a play on The Long Goodbye, the famous Raymond Chandler novel. Mitch watches the Robert Altman 1973 version with Elliott Gould on TV during a scene. Black himself seems like the type of writer who would’ve been a major rival/competitor to Chandler and Jim Thompson who wrote gritty noir stories about lowlifes and scuzzy people doing bad things. But Black adds a nice comedic twist to them.
Even his contribution to the MCU with Iron Man 3 was more of a Chandler story crossed with a Tom Clancy thriller as Tony Stark is more like a hardened veteran cop/private investigator searching for clues rather than fighting bad guys. While Harlin’s movies since this have been mostly forgettable movies as he’s been nominated at the Worst Director four times through the Golden Raspberry Awards, this remains one of his best movies so far.
Despite mostly positive reviews, the movie had a poor box office in the U.S., which both Harlin and Black attributed to poor marketing by New Line Cinema. Black added he thought audiences were turned away by the fact it was Davis in the main role and not a man. He would run into the same problems later with Iron Man 3 where Marvel and Disney executives requested smaller roles for the women and even the switch of the main villain from a woman to a man because of merchandising. There was also some concern the failure of Cutthroat Island was still lingering even though it had been released in 1995.
Overall, Goodnight grossed over $95 million against a $65 million budget and has since gained a strong cult following. So, if you watch Die Hard and Lethal Weapon on Christmas and not this one, you might want to add it to your watchlist.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 