CINEMA-USA: Standard Action for Amnesiac Housewife Annex Assassin

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Dec 3 1996 (IPS) - After the bombast and machismo of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone films, a movie that matches explosions and gun battles with an appealing female protagonist could be a refreshing change of pace.

That, at least, could be the thinking behind ‘The Long Kiss Goodnight’, a TriStar movie which opened last month as a moderate success. The film, featuring Geena Davis, is directed by Davis’ husband Renny Harlin.

‘The Long Kiss Goodnight’ is about as standard as action fare gets: a few botched assassinations, several intensely loud explosions and a convoluted plot involving rogue Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents and an effort to raise funds from Congress by faking a Muslim terrorist attack.

But ‘The Long Kiss Godnight’, written by Shane Black (who also wrote the similarly generic ‘Die Hard’), throws into the mix the character of Samantha Caine (played by Davis), an amnesiac housewife who is actually — surprise — a trained assassin. That twist, more than anything, accounts for the fact that Black earned four million dollars for his script, the highest sum yet paid to a Hollywood writer.

For those four million dollars, viewers are treated to such bon mots as the heroine’s climactic, “Die screaming, motherf—–.” One wonders what the rash of films based on Shakespeare and Jane Austen would have netted their authors on Hollywood’s free market.

Still, there is a special quality to Davis, who has acted in such above-average movies as ‘Thelma and Louise’ and ‘A League of Their Own’, which also focus on tough women taking on previously male genres like road picaresques or baseball films.

In this one, Davis is appealing as someone who has no idea about her past identity, but is surprised to find that she can kill a deer with a well-placed tug and chop vegetables at lightning-fast speed. “I’m a chef,” she says, puzzled. “Chefs do that.”

But she isn’t a chef; instead, she is a CIA killer bearing the unlikely name of Charlie Baltimore. Soon, Caine and her sidekick, detective Mitch Hennessey — played by Samuel L. Jackson, who plays similar black sidekick roles in seemingly dozens of movies — are pursued by various killers and thugs and narrowly escaping death.

The only other twist in the stunningly illogical film, in which the villains repeatedly explain what their plans are before trying to kill the heroes in absurdly elaborate ways, is that Caine must also protect her daughter from the bad guys. The heroine, Black implies, must learn to reconcile her cold-blooded assassin’s world with her maternal instincts.

That dichotomy is just one of several that shows how ‘The Long Kiss Goodnight’ isn’t as radical a reshaping of the action genre as it thinks. Davis has to play two widely divergent roles: a sweet mother who bakes cookies, and a peroxide-blonde killer who talks in a husky voice about how all life is pain. Macho Stallone movies, of course, lack such a bizarre feminine-masculine split, but are also spared the idiocy of reductive definitions of what “feminine” and “masculine” are.

The movie nevertheless has its amusing moments. When Davis, still befuddled as Samantha Caine, says she doesn’t understand why killers are hunting her when she is just a housewife, her mentor counters, “Well, quit.”

Davis and Jackson — both much better actors than the genre allows — also trade some wry, observant banter about why men gawk at women and about machismo itself. At such points, the film takes on a self-parodic quality that indicates the sort of better, somewhat more self-critical action film it could be.

But then the absurdities pile on, as do the ear-crunching moments of extreme violence. Long before its end, ‘The Long Kiss Goodnight’ has bid a long farewell to reason, and become only a slight variation on the sort of action film that Davis and Harlin presumably mean to subvert.