Oy!

The Long Kiss Goodnight is one of the most ridiculous movies that were meant to be taken seriously that I have ever seen. It has such a flimsy plot: a “lost” CIA agent with amnesia rediscovers her past because a stupid foe breaks out of prison and tries to kill her. This action leads to more and more and more until the audience discovers that the bad guys are being paid by the head of the CIA so that he can get more funds from Congress. What an inspired story! The screenplay is just as good. The following are some of my favorite (and by favorite I mean incredibly laughable, and not in a good or funny way) lines from the movie:

Charlie/Samantha: “No, it’s not a fantasy! I’m in the goddamn PTA!”

Mitch: “So kill ‘em for me, bitch! What are you good for?!”

Truck Driver: “I think I’m dying!”
Timothy: “Continue dying…out.”

Charlie: “Oh, honey… only four inches?”

Timothy: “You’ll feel me.”

I do realize that these lines are meant to pull laughs, but they are incredibly absurd to me. The writing for this movie was really bad.

As far as the biracial buddy cop aspect goes, I don’t feel that race really beings much to the table for this film. The only real impact that the difference in race makes is for purposes of dialogue. For instance, when Charlie is coming on to Mitch in the hotel room, Mitch responds by saying, “White lady’s seducin’ the colored help.” It’s a laugh, and obviously influenced by race. The male/female pairing is more influential. It is very apparent that the makers of this movie wanted Geena Davis to be very ass-kickingly masculine for her role. At the same time, though, the Charlie character eventually does realize that she does in fact love her daughter; she had earlier said something along the lines of, “I didn’t have the kid, Samantha did! No body asked me!” This change illustrates the progression Charlie makes in becoming a mixture of both herself and Samantha. Mitch also changes, but his are not so personal. His changes are more out of necessity. He was a fairly laughable private eye until he got mixed up in Charlie’s life. Suddenly he is being shot at and therefore must adapt and retaliate with that violience. I don’t feel he changes all that much.

The hero/sidekick relationship is far more apparent in The Long Kiss Goodnight than it has been in the last three films we have watched. Mitch is sidekick to Charlie’s heroic role. At the beginning, both hero and sidekick are outsiders to the world Charlie had lived in, but as the story progresses, Charlie leaves Mitch behind and becomes an insider once more.

Not much more to say, I don’t think. Not a very good movie at all.