A fantasy thriller with hopes of being tormented and dark, The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) is an oddball point on the evolutionary graph of the female action heroine. Its heroine Charly Baltimore (Geena Davis, pictured right) is a trained government killing machine with amnesia and hopes for a domestic life, just like Jason Bourne. But her identity crisis is nothing on the film’s wild and still unemulated attempt to forge designer macho feminist chic.
Renny Harlan, Davis’s husband at the time, directed with all the reserve of a pillaging Viking, taking the parodic bounce in Shane Black’s script and burying it under over-the-top spectacle.
In 1994, The Long Kiss Goodnight set a new record of $4 million for a spec script sale. Black had enjoyed huge early success by amping up the buddy formula with his script for Lethal Weapon. He would later succumb to depression and retreat from Hollywood for a few years before returning with a low-budget thriller, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), that upended all the conventions it could.
Although written in the rabid script-selling heyday of Joe Basic Instinct Eszterhas, The Long Kiss Goodnight contains plenty of pointers to Black’s future disillusion. It would have contained more, but the studio sanitised much of the brackish humour that undercut the picture-postcard town where Davis settles in her suburban mom incarnation. When a drunken Santa Claus gets killed in an explosion, for example, the local kids gleefully plunder the toys from his sleigh.
Black had fashioned a downbeat ending,which was reshot after Henessey, the sidekick character played by Samuel L. Jackson, proved to be more popular in test screenings than Davis’s heroine.
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Originally Jackson was to die in a wash of blood, with Davis weeping over her steering wheel in somewhat high style. “She leans on the dash,” the script went. “Cries for a while. For herself, for Henessey . . . for this godawful planet and everything else.”
In the final version he lives and she ends up playing with her family in the country.
The softening up was to no avail. The film barely earned half of its budget at the box office in 1996. This was partly due to the glut of films after Pulp Fiction all parading the same knowing style of self-reflexive quips and pop culture riffs, and partly due to fatigue setting into the action genre.
But the film’s failure was mostly due to the enduring confusion about who the audience was for female action heroes. It was not yet generally assumed to be the same audience for regular action heroes — teenage boys and young men. This discovery would lead to cartoon hits such as Lara Croft, where the breasts were huge and the physical prowess was fun, not scary.
In The Last Kiss Goodnight, Davis plays not only a married mother, but also a slightly unhinged former assassin. The violence is decidedly not in the light-done-right James Bond tradition. In the opening scene, she kills a deer by snapping its neck.
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The great early action heroines, such as Sigourney Weaver in Aliens and Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, were fortunate to arrive before the industry was completely enslaved by the teenage demographic. These women could be credible warriors with leadership skills and no-frills professionalism. If you found them attractive, it was a bonus. Finding Davis attractive here is closer to a cry for help.
The Long Kiss Goodnight, Sunday, Five (9pm)