Long Kiss Goodnight

It is rare that cop films focus on the life of a woman.  The Long Kiss Goodnight takes on the different dynamic of gender. Usually the women in the films we have watched are merely just the romantic subjects of the cop buddies. Here Geena Davis stars as Charly Baltimore, the main hero in the movie.  She used to be an assassin for the US government until she developed amnesia and now thinks she is Samantha Caine, a normal housewife, an alter ego shes been going by for the past 8 years.  She hires detectives to figure out who she really is.  That is where her side kick, Mitch Hennessy is played by Samuel Jackson comes into play.  Jackson is the typical angry black man who deems his entire life as a failure and doesn’t have the best reputation even with his own family.  Even Charly mentions in the beginning that they had hired expensive detectives, but were now down to the cheap ones.  This insinuates that he isn’t the best at his job. This all changes by the end of the movie, when he is able to save Charly and her daughter. He helps her track down people of her past, who may help them figure out her true identity.  Throughout the movie, different traits of her personality come back to her, and she goes back and forth between the two identities. When she becomes Charly again, she is able to fight off hundreds of men, yet when she is Samantha she can barely cut a carrot.  The movie as a whole failed to keep me interested.  Her personality shifts caused the movie to become humorous rather than intense and thrilling.