Thursday, January 10, 2008

Finally a female who is kicking some BUTT! The Long Kiss Goodnight is a movie that I have never seen before until today. Instead of starting off the buddy cop movie with the traditional fight/ chase scene the audience got to see the life of an ordinary women who normally wouldn’t fit the standard picture of cop. Instead we get to see another side of the hero: the suburban homemaker, a mom to her eight year old daughter Caitlin, and a wife to a loving husband, living in the quiet suburbs. However the plot thickens when she hits her head after getting in a car accident causing her to remember that she had once been a CIA agent; it is because she has regained her memory that a group of her old team members are sent out to kill her.

To me this is where I felt the standard buddy cop scenario of scenes took a turn because instead of starting off with the buddy cops meeting each other within the first twenty minutes of the movie; we have them meet only after her character hires him to help her track down facts about her old life. This is where the movie appears to drop back on track in the typical buddy cop genre. Mitch Hennessy (Samuel L. Jackson) is the typical sidekick; he is loud, outspoken, who feels the world owes him something.

However we also get to see a softer side of when we get a glimpse into his family life which allows him to relate to Charlie or shall I say Samantha family life (this may be one of the reasons why he did not want to sleep with her). Before continuing in my analysis of this film I just wanted to point out that the name choice for the leading lady was a masculine name. I was wondering if everyone else thought that this was on purpose because the audience is more used to seeing a male in the hero position. I think that by choosing a masculine named it totally transformed her from Samantha a house wife to an ass kicking assassin.

After seeing this movie for the second time it allowed me to see that even with special editing and special effects the cinematography did not impress me. In fact I found myself laughing during a lot of the fight scenes towards the last twenty minutes of the movie.

1 Comments:

Blogger Cat said...

I also noticed that her character was given a masculine name. I'm not sure why that is, but even when she was going by Samantha people repeatedly called her Sam. I thought that was kind of interesting.

On another note, I think that Mitch and Charlie/Sam met before the movie even began, because he'd been searching for remnants of her past before we even meet her. I think this puts an interesting spin on the movie because it seems as if the buddy cop aspect of the film really starts when Mitch meets Sam's alter ego Charlie. This may have been exactly what you were saying, but I was a bit confused. Sorry.

10:41 PM  

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