The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
Posted By Action Flick Chick on December 10, 2008
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Oh the weather outside is frightful…and so is Samantha Caine, or Charly Baltimore, or whatever her name is. Geena Davis is Samantha Caine in The Long Kiss Goodnight and she is one bad ass chick. A trained assassin in a former life, Caine’s now suffering from amnesia and doesn’t remember anything. That’s where Samuel L. Jackson shows up (his character’s name doesn’t even matter, it’s Samuel L. Jackson. He’s so awesome that everyone calls him by his full name all the time.) Samuel L. Jackson plays a crappy “detective” who stumbles on some actual information about Caine and the two of them pair up to get to the bottom of things. It is a very good movie equipped with witty banter between Samuel L. Jackson and Davis, who work well together, not to mention some artery-cutting action to boot.
It does take a while for the action to get started, but once it does it’s just a hoot! Lots of kills, car chases, narrow escapes, and the best part of all is that this is happening just a few days before Christmas. Merry Christmas, kids! Your mom is a trained assassin and can snap a guy’s neck with one hand while baking a pie with the other. I would tell Santa to keep away from this household, or he might find a .45 caliber at the end of that chimney. The Long Kiss Goodnight is equipped with all the traditional Christmas activities: caroling with a gun stuck to your head, going to church and having your kid kidnapped, going to visit your family and realizing that they are targets that you were once sent to kill…all the good stuff.
The bad guys in this movie make the classic bad guy mistake that all movies make. Here they have this super assassin in their custody, and what do they do? They decide to kill her the slowest, most escapable way possible. Why don’t you just shoot them in the head and be done with it? No, that’s too easy (plus it is just a movie. Killing the main character at the beginning of the final act isn’t exactly good form.) The bad guys leaving a super assassin alone to die in any way is like signing their own death certificates. Hello! Super assassin here! Are you depressed because you have to spend Christmas planning terrorist attacks and secretly want to die? Because you just made that possible when you left this chick alone. Silly bad guys, they will never learn. However, it makes for a great action movie and unless you are training your kiddies to become the winner of the Most Foul Mouthed Little Terrors contest, I would keep them away from this one, as it has bad words aplenty.
Time until the real action starts: ~ 24 minutes
Big bad baddies: Rogue CIA operatives
Best Line: Samuel L. Jackson busted in on some dude with a…pretty lady who performs special jobs for money. He says, “You’re assuming I won’t shoot your sorry ass, and everyone knows when you make an assumption, you make an ass out of you…and Umption.”
Best Kill: There are a lot of good kills in this movie, but the best one involves a triple takedown. Caine is in an alley with a bad guy pointing a gun at her head. Samuel L. Jackson shows up and points a gun at the bad guy’s head. Caine, not being a woman who needs rescuing, punches the bad guy in the throat and takes his gun. She pulls him into a head lock, spins, and shoots another bad guy over Samuel L. Jackson’s shoulder. She does another 180 and shoots a third bad guy jumping out of the shadows. Whatever happened to the guy she had in a head lock, one might ask. Well, he was her personal body shield and was shot by the other two bad guys. All the while, Samuel L. Jackson is standing there looking like he pooped his pants.
Best Explosion: The best explosion almost always happens at the end of the movie. It’s the great finale. The Long Kiss Goodnight follows suit. A gas truck is wired with a huge bomb. It is crashed right on the border between Canada and the US at Niagara Falls on a bridge. It blows up knocking out most of the bridge. The whole screen is a ball of flames on this one. It was massive.
Best Narrow Escape: Caine and Samuel L. Jackson are running from some bad guys in a train station. They are three stories up and Samuel L. Jackson is saying that they should just turn and start shooting when a grenade falls in front of them. He yells, “F*** it” and they run down the hallway. Caine shoots out the glass at the end and they jump out the window. Below them is an iced over body of water. Caine starts shooting the ice and just in time for them to fall through safely.
Rating: 3 ½ Santa L. Jacksons, out of 5
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