I love these main actors in most of what they've done, but I actually got bored watching them. It started as interesting, then the story swung to government secret operatives, that was the first yawn. Then the road trip, SLJ making a jerks play on GD is silly, but the easy call to meet up with BC, it's sloppy screenwriting. It's all been done far better before.

The Long Kiss GoodnightThe best gift you can give an assassin at Christmas is a contract on a cheating spouse.Regrettably, the killer in this action movie has forgotten who she is.When a holiday head injury jogs memories of her being a CIA assassin, mild-mannered schoolteacher Samantha (Geena Davis) hires a private detective (Samuel L. Jackson) to help her uncover this mysterious past she has forgotten.It's not long until the agent who tried to kill her the first time comes to finish the job that Sam recalls her final mission to frame Islamic terrorists for a CIA bombing of Niagara Falls.With its breakneck action sequences, slick dialogue and hilarious performance from Sam Jackson, this highly underrated buddy picture from 1996 is also a neglected Christmas movie that deserves a seat at the yuletide action movie table. Besides, with all of the seasonal suicides Christmas is a slow time for hit-men.Green Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

1996's The Long Kiss Goodnight was the second movie in a row that director Renny Harlin made with his then-wife Geena Davis. Davis played a pirate in the previous year's Cutthroat Island. Harlin previously directed The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Die Hard 2 which were edited simultaneously and released just a week apart. Die Hard 2 was a huge hit and Ford Fairlane starred Andrew Dice Clay. Harlin started his career by directing Finland's most expensive film and the slashers Prison and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. The screenplay was written by action movie pioneer Shane Black who also wrote Lethal Weapon, Lethal Weapon 2, The Last Boy Scout and The Last Action Hero. Alan Silvestri composed the Original Music and the Cinematography was by Guillermo Navarro.There are rumours and rumours of rumours that a sequel to Renny Harlin's The Long Kiss Goodnight is in the works. I inexplicably missed the original when it came out and dismissed it as just another action flick. I was more than surprised at how prescient a movie it was at the time. The nineties was an adventurous time for filmmaking. Increasingly influenced by music videos, a lot of the art showed dark overtones, in bright colours and quick cuts. Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs brought a sense of low-budget high-octane fun and breakaway banter back into the movies. He also expanded on the naturalistic acting styles in Barry Levinson's conversational film Diner that let everyday small talk happen while allowing the plot to move along as it might. On the surface, The Long Kiss Goodnight is a fast-paced adventure movie with a quick wit, an accelerating pace, famous locations, and a female hero that performs too many impossible physical feats. Underneath it is an allegory to the growing paranoiac conspiracy theories that are now flooding into the mainstream. The movie references the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Samantha Caine's transformation into the regrettably-named Charly Baltimore can be seen as an allusion to sleeper-agent multiple personality assassins.

Incredible elements. A Renny Harlin film, which essentially means that, after the film is in the can, either the director or the audience will be a candidate for a rubber room, one or the other. Geena Davis in what (unfortunately) seems to have been her attempt to get back in the game by betting it all on a wacky High Concept script with a wacky director (Sharon Stone did the same with her she-man Italian western, also in my IMDb reviews). And Samuel L. Jackson doing what he did best by this stage in his career -- essentially playing himself. (Cinephiles in the future may argue to whether his character was even needed in the story, but no matter). The film is uneven. But to steal a line from early in the last century, even when it is bad, it is very very good. Davis, a trooper if ever there was one, put everything she has into this project and it shows. There are "bits" here which rank with the very best of the iconic films of old -- such as the set piece in the kitchen where amnesiac Davis does things with a knife not even Ronco ever imagined, and then concludes with the unforgettable line, "Chefs do that!" And the scene where a former student of Davis' accidentally bumps into her when she is in her alternate persona, and reprimands her for smoking .. well, the word "brilliant" does not come close. Highly recommended, warts and all, more fun than a barrel of hammers.