Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

The Long Kiss Goodnight

Like a Jewish mother, a Catholic school nun or a chick paralyzed from the waist down, Cinemavenger is hard to please.  Combine a tougher-than-the-toughest-titty critic with the remarkably shit state of movies these days, and you get a mere eight movies earning the coveted One Finger (I.E. Excellent) rating . . . in over three and a half years.

So from time to time, say during the January-February dumping ground for ass-wafting wastes of film, a Cinemavenger Classic review might just pop up like morning wood and with a smile and a wink say, "Suck on this."

Way back at the turn of the century, Renny "Faire" Harlin dropped one of the four good movies he's ever made.  It was the story of a forgetful secret agent, and its name was The Long Kiss Goodnight.  It was written by Shane "Don't Go!" Black, which you can smell from farther away than a wharf whore's scabrous twat.  Who else but the yule fetishist Black could've penned this noir-ish action/comedy mashup featuring Santa suits, carolers and more Xmas lights than the tree at Rockefeller Center?

Geena "Sammy" Davis stars as Samantha Cain, a six-foot tall, smoke show single mom and schoolmarm whose retrograde amnesia prevents her from realizing that she's actually a deadly super spy.  When her assassin past comes back to haunt her, she hits the road with the low-rent private investigator she hired to look into her past, Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. "Say What Again" Jackson), to figure out who she was and why the fuck people are trying to kill her.

This leads to witty repartee like when Samantha and Mitch obtain some crucial info., and in the process Mitch gets kneed in the nuts.  Samantha asks, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"  To which Mitch replies, "I hope not, 'cuz I'm thinking how much my balls hurt!"  Cue 90s electric guitar sting.

The most important lesson The Long Kiss Goodnight teaches is that - just as much as the script or the director - casting fucking matters.  Jackson's P.I. was originally supposed to be played by Craig "We Make Beer" Bierko whose Hollywood niche is "the generically good-looking White guy douche."  Bierko ended up playing the Big Bad's lieutenant, and anyone who can't see that switching Jackson out for Bierko would've killed The Long Kiss Goodnight deader than dial-up can die screaming, motherfucker.

January 26, 2018