August 1, 2017
I have been fascinated by cult films for a long time. The
Danny Peary books really turned my head, and my movie hunger, on to some movies
I would have never seen otherwise. Since then, I have kept my ear to the ground
on movies that develop a following, even though they may not have done diddly
at the box office. Have no fear, some of these will be discussed later on in
the 365 Degrees, I am sure. Hey, I actually plotted out a course to several of
them, just to be positive I got to talk about them.
Knightriders was one of those. A film nobody really saw at
first, until it hit the realm of Blockbuster Video ( yeah, remember them?).
One, though, I stumbled into because I had four hours to kill before catching a
plane from Orlando to Atlanta. If you know anything about me, you know waiting
is NOT one of my good traits. My patience level has waned rapidly since the age
of… oh… nine? It’s not about instant gratification, not at all. It’s more about
the fact that, if I have to wait for any length of time, my mind wanders,
sometimes in ways it shouldn’t. I start thinking things like, “That door says, ‘Do
Not Enter Under Penalty of Law.’ I wonder what would happen if I opened it, but
didn’t ACTUALLY enter…”
But I digress…
I had had a great week in Orlando, my plane didn’t leave
until 5 pm, but I had to be out of my hotel by noon. Not enough time to squeeze
another theme park in, I didn’t want to hit the outlet mall for the Disney
Warehouse Store again, and I damn sure didn’t want to hang out in an airport
bar for four hours. So I started driving around in my Dodge Daytona rental
(lemme tell you, don’t ever think that was a cool car, no matter how much you
love Daytona Beach…), and I found a movie theatre on International Boulevard. A
double-screen place, showing two movies. The Glimmer Man, which I refused to
see because there is only so much Steven Seagal one man can take in a lifetime,
and The Long Kiss Goodnight, which starred Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson. I
took the latter choice. Thankfully…
The story is about a schoolteacher named Samantha Caine
(Geena Davis.). She lives in a storybook little town in Pennsylvania with her
boyfriend, Tom, and her daughter, Caitlin. Samantha was found eight years
prior, washed up on a New Jersey beach, pregnant, and totally amnesiac as to
her identity. Having never remembered her real name or any sort of detail about
her former life, she has hired a number of private detectives to find some
answers about her.
During the Christmas holidays, she has a car accident,
hitting a deer on a back road. She takes a tremendous blow to the head during
the accident. She crawls out of the car and breaks the deer’s neck in a mercy
killing, then realizes she had no idea how to do that before. Later, after a
brief stay in the hospital, she demonstrates an incredible mastery of knife
skills while cooking supper for her family. Obviously, the blow to the head has
awakened some part of her previous life, but she has no idea exactly what part.
Some time later, a man known as “One-Eyed Jack” breaks out of prison after
seeing Samantha on the news, and attacks her in her home. Samantha somehow
subdues him with a pie (yes, a pie), and breaks his neck the same way she did
with the deer.
Enter Mitch Hennessy (Samuel L. Jackson), one of the many
private detectives Sam has hired. He is the first to have found any sort of items
or contacts about Sam’s previous life. Sam, being frightened by her prowess in
the art of killing, decides to leave with Mitch to explore these contacts,
mainly so she will not scare her daughter any more. Mitch gives her a suitcase
that was found nearby where she was found in New Jersey. Among the items in the
case is a note from a Dr. Nathan Waldman (Brian Cox, our Hannibal Lektor from
last night’s movie, and yes, I know it’s spelled different – read yesterday’s
post!) Mitch and Sam agree to meet Dr. Waldman in a train station, but en route
to the station, Sam finds a disassembled sniper rifle hidden under a false
bottom of the suitcase, a rifle she somehow knows how to assemble perfectly and
without instruction.
At the station, they are attacked by a number of agents,
whom Samantha easily kills. The doctor reveals that Samantha is actually an
expert CIA assassin named Charlene “Charly” Baltimore, an agent who disappeared
eight years ago. Not knowing if they can trust Waldman, they incapacitate him
and take off to find a man named in another note, a man named Luke (David
Morse), who, in the note, is called Charly’s “engagement”. As it turns out,
though, “engagement,” in this case, does not mean he was Charly’s fiancé. Instead,
we find out “engagement” means he was Charly’s last assassination target, a
target known as “Daedelus.” Luke kills Waldman and tortures Charly, trying to
find out what she knows and where she has been for the past eight years.
Instead, the torture flips the last switch on Charly’s personality, and awakens
the pure assassin she once was.
Cue the killing on a grand scale, the blood on an even
grander scale, and the insane violence on the grandest scale. Charly and Mitch
end up trying to stop a plot to set off a nuclear bomb near Niagara Falls,
while saving her daughter, Caitlin, from the terrorists who have kidnapped her
as a way of making Charly back away. Spoiler alert – it don’t work at all…
I bet, right now, you are sitting there saying, “Damn, that
took a lot of time to describe that plot!” Well, when you talk about a script
by Shane Black, it is never as easy as 1, 2, 3. Shane Black, whose work I
respect like hell, has a knack for weaving the most bizarre plots, with more
twists and turns than a corkscrew factory, but, amazingly, they always work!
Director Renny Harlin, who was married at the time to Geena Davis, really puts
his beautiful bride through all manner of hell in this movie. Suppoosedly,
Harlin had Davis force herself to hold her breath underwater for up to five
minutes so she could perform her own stunts during the torture sequences. And
that’s the tamest thing Davis goes through in this movie.
It has been said that this movie performed so poorly at the
box office on its initial run because, while Black had written the script
specifically for Harlin to direct and Davis to star in, they were contractually
obligated to do Cutthroat Island first, a pirate movie featuring Davis as a
swashbuckling pirate queen. When Cutthroat Island bombed horribly, both Davis
and Harlin’s stock dropped just as fast as their movie bombed. Nobody wanted to
see them teamed up again, and thus, The
Long Kiss Goodnight didn’t make nearly the money it had been projected to make.
It only started to make money when the publicity campaign
was retooled to feature Samuel L. Jackson on the posters. Jackson was fresh off
his triumphant performance as Jules Winfield in Pulp Fiction, and he was hotter
than a two-dollar pistol in box office draws. Once the movie hit pay-tv and the
home video market, it took off. People loved the movie, and its reputation grew.
People quickly forgot about Cutthroat Island (which is a good thing, because it
really sucks…), and Davis and Harlin were forgiven. For a while, at least.
There is so much to love about this movie. If you are a fan
of stunt work, you will wet yourself over some of the crazy fight scenes and
shootouts. Craig Beirko, who plays the agent who thought he killed Charly eight
years ago, is fun to watch. He is just as sarcastic as Charly is serious, and
watching him get madder and madder as he continues to fail to kill her is great
fun. But the most fun comes when watching Geena Davis lose her cute, quaint
schoolteacher persona and morph into her previous persona of Charly Baltimore.
Davis’ trademark smile fades from her face and is replaced by a badass scowl.
Layers of eyeliner and a bad blonde dye job change her whole appearance from
clean-cut and wholesome to a woman you would be scared to ask for a dime, much
less a favor. 
And, hey, let’s face it, this is Samuel L. Jackson still in
Pulp Fiction mode. He’s oddly philosophical about his life, yet he has no
qualms about calling himself a ‘bad mother*cker.” Here, though, he finds an
even more comical version of his bad MF persona as he is the unwilling straight
man to Davis’ freaky transformation. He is often left staring at her in
complete shock as she wields some weapon or pulls off some incredible hack job
on a bad guy. At times, the only thing that seems to be missing is a good Lou
Costello double-take before he runs offscreen.
If you’re looking for a movie you haven’t seen, and really
want to enjoy, look no further than The Long Kiss Goodnight. It’s a great
script, and a great action movie. And, really, this was the precursor to so
many movies now that put a female in the lead of an action movie. Who woulda
thought Geena Davis could be an unfeeling killing machine long before Charlize
Theron or Scarlett Johansson? And, you know what, she pulls it off in a major
way. Give it a shot, you won’t be sorry!
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