In this movie, Geena Davis plays a school teacher who lost her memory eight years previous; her first memory is waking up almost naked on the beach, shivering and newly pregnant. Now she's got a great daughter, a loving boyfriend and the sort of the small East Coast town that feels utterly and horrifically fake. Through the usual series of mishaps, she eventually recovers bits of her memory as-- ta-dah!-- a government assassin.
Geena Davis does a nice star turn, alternately nice and goofy and sexily dangerous, Samuel Jackson is once again a pure pleasure to watch as a slightly seedy and broken down P.I., and Renny Harlin seems to find a way to make his brutal sledge-hammerstyle actually attractive. I hate to play into people's cultural stereotypes, but Renny's best movies (his most financially successful ones, any way) usually have jovial psychopaths bloodily pounding the tar out of each other in the snow. Is it surprising to anyone that Renny is a native Scandinavian?
But the movie really belongs, believe it or not, to screenwriter Shane Black. History will no doubt be very ambivalent to Black, writer of the first two Lethal Weapons and the Last Boy Scout, the guy who makes just under Joe Esterhausian levels of loot for his blood drenched formulaic screenplays, the sort of things that Joel Silver approvingly describes as "generically unique." His screenplays have a clever eye for explosions, torture scenes, three act structure (well, two tight acts and usually an incredibly empty third), and casually jokey and obscene dialogue, the sort of amiable joshery some clever ex-jocks who've had a few too many beers might toss around down at the sports bar. But the critics who refer to the dialogue in The Long Kiss Goodnight as some of the best pseudo-Tarantinoish dialogue around miss the point. Black's style, from Lethal Weapon to The Monster Squad (yes, I saw it, dammit) to this, has been the same since the early eighties, merely growing more breezy as time goes on. It's Tarantino that has taken his cues from Black.
Oddly enough, I can see how Tarantino and Black, as if in a strange, big-budget remake of Freaky Friday, might gladly switch places with each other. Black, an action adventure hacksmith, gets big bucks and no expectations from anyone, and gets to write bloody, funny, nihilistic action movies that no one expects anything durable from. I can see how Tarantino might want that these days. And Tarantino, no matter how badly people pelt him with rotten fruit, will still get a couple of films where he can wander off subject and off-genre as much as he wants, and I sometimes think Black, whose scripts are reasonably consistent with their usage of self-loathing protagonists, might really enjoy the chance to dig to the rotting fruit that he keeps underneath all that rich fertilizer he's paid to spread around.
All written material on these pages is © 1997 by Jeff Lester. With the exception of non-profit distribution, all other rights are reserved.