When it ran in theaters, I kept wanting to see this film but never got a chance. Then seeing the trailer for it on videos kept my interest peaked. Finally, I got a chance to see The Long Kiss Goodnight. What I thought would be a great shoot-em up with a cool plot ended up being mediocre at best.
Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) is this prissy schoolteacher. She has had amnesia for about eight years and can't remember where she came from. She gets in a car wreck after a Christmas party and starts having a vision of some hard-case chick named Charly. Now Samantha goes around playing with knives and acting like a rough customer.
Enter Mitch Hennesey (Samuel L. Jackson) a seedy detective that Samantha has hired to find her past. He has come up with some information that might help Samantha. They get some papers that had belonged to Samantha years before. A book with a name and a phone number might yield an answer.
Samantha calls the number and sets up a whole chain of events that includes people being shot in a train station while Samantha and Mitch escape by jumping out a window and landing in a frozen lake. The lake becomes available because Samantha shoots holes in the ice as she and Mitch are falling from the window. Great visual effects, but realistic? Give me a break.
Samantha ends up finding out that she's actually Charly Baltimore, a stone killer of an espionage agent. She was supposedly killed off eight years ago by the bad guys. But who are the good guys and who are the bad? The lines get really blurred here.
The plot is pretty convoluted. The head of the CIA is tired of getting his budget cut. He's now hiring people who once were the bad guys to help him out. In a ridiculous plot line, he sets up a supposed terrorist attack to gain some more funding from Congress.
Geena Davis is a good actress. I just wonder if she was cut out to play these over the top, tough chick roles. I liked her a lot better in films like A League Of Their Own and Speechless.
The film was produced and directed by Renny Harlin, who was Ms. Davis' husband at the time. It also has Brian Cox, David Morse, Tom Amandes, Craig Bierko and Yvonne Zimain supporting roles.
The Long Kiss Goodnight has a run time of 103 minutes and carries an R rating. It was released by New Line Cinema.