The Long Kiss Goodnight 4K 1996

Here was supposed to be another libation about the action genre being in bad shape and systematically moving to the “B” category. But you already know this: the grass used to be greener, the sky was clearer and brighter, and action movies were still being made. It was in times like these that Renny Harlin, who had just put Carolco Studios on the seabed, made one of the best examples of the genre in the second half of the nineties.

Samantha Kane looks about thirty-five years old, but she was “born” eight years ago, when she was fished out of the bottom of the sea pregnant, lost her memory and with a shot through her head. Since then, she's been living in a small town, working as a teacher and trying to learn about her past. But as soon as Samantha's alter ego comes to the surface, a local Armageddon occurs, deporting hundreds of bad guys' souls to the other world and causing global destruction in the surrounding areas.

The main treasure of Harlin's picture is, of course, Shane Black's script, in which he again wrote dialog like no one else in the buddy-movie genre, and brought the formula of such films to absurdity. Instead of two different in form, but necessarily cool in content guys, we were given an African-American man who has little understanding of what he has gotten himself into, and a woman who, at first glance, should die almost in the first scene.

Geena Davis, having tried on herself the role of badass-heroine in “Cutthroat Island”, here she went even further, at the snap of her fingers changing the avatar of a mother, keeper of the home to a grombaba, capable of skating a whole brigade of “cleaners”. Samuel L. Jackson again plays the role of the funny partner, behind whom you only have time to write down the expressions that crash into your memory.

“The Long Kiss Goodnight”, like a blast from the past, easily puts the audience's brains in sleep mode for two hours, throws a bucket of popcorn in your hands, squeezes into the chair with a good portion of adrenaline and gives you the pleasure of watching a movie, which are no longer filmed.