A History of Violence

I was originally going to call this one “Go Get ’Em, Amnesia Chick,” but as I was finishing it up the latest edition of The Reveal arrived in my inbox, featuring Scott Tobias’ typically excellent retrospective piece on David Cronenberg’s 2005 thriller about an ordinary family man who turns out to be hiding a much nastier person inside. And maybe Renny Harlin’s The Long Kiss Goodnight isn’t punching on the same level, but the echoes are there, and not just because Geena Davis has also worked with David Cronenberg in another great movie about an unexpected (and terrible) personality crisis.

Newly reissued by Arrow Video in a glorious new 4K edition, The Long Kiss Goodnight has never gotten the respect it deserves – possibly because it’s the movie then-couple Harlin and Davis made immediately after the disaster that was Cutthroat Island, and possibly because it’s the kind of movie that doesn’t care if you respect it.

Have you seen The Long Kiss Goodnight? Because you should see The Long Kiss Goodnight. Another of Shane Black’s willfully preposterous Christmas action-comedies – bought for a reported $4 million when New Line Cinema was flying high on its acquisition by Turner Broadcasting – it spins the deliriously pulpy story of Samantha Caine (Davis, obviously), a small-town amnesiac who discovers she used to be a ruthless government assassin just as she’s targeted by the same thugs who nearly killed her eight years earlier [deep breath] and who are currently just days away from staging a mass-casualty event on American soil. Also she has a sidekick, sleazy private investigator Mitch Hennessey, who is of course played by Samuel L. Jackson at his most endearingly cranky.

Dropped into theaters in the fall of 1996 by New Line – which was in a bit of an identity crisis, since Turner was in the process of being acquired by Time Warner – the movie was packaged as another generic assassin picture without a hint of how weird or goofy or funny it was.

People forget how many assassin pictures came out of Hollywood in the ’90s, almost all of them trying to ride the success of La Femme Nikita. A couple of them were pretty good; The Long Kiss Goodnight is one of them. And like Grosse Pointe Blank a year later, it stands out because it embraces the absurdity of its concept while still finding a way to give its hero’s identity crisis real stakes.

And also like Grosse Pointe Blank, The Long Kiss Goodnight is funny. Black’s dialogue is a singular pleasure, finding weird curves on expected punchlines – an early scene establishes the movie’s sense of humor when Mitch scolds a scumbag for making an assumption, because when you do that, “you make an ass of you and umption” – and the delight Sam and Mitch take in needling each other over the course of their Christmas adventure is right in line with the rhythms of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Nice Guys. When Sam’s alter ego Charly takes over halfway through the picture, we even miss the chemistry they’ve established – though Davis still has a great time showing the two personalities clashing and harmonizing over the course of the picture.

I haven’t even mentioned the supporting cast, which includes Brian Cox, David Morse and Craig Bierko in roles that let them be deadly serious and not-so-quietly ridiculous in the same breath – Davis and Jackson aren’t the only ones having fun here – or the deranged invention of the set pieces, each one a tribute to the ingenuity of various technicians and stunt players as well as Davis herself, who seems to have been up for pretty much everything Harlin could throw at her.

And as chaotic as the master plot might seem to the characters trying to figure it out, Black’s script is both ingeniously structured and infernally clever, pulling on the specifically American streak of paranoid cynicism reignited by The X-Files to tell a story that is, in the rear view, distressingly plausible. Harlin takes every one of Black’s ideas and amps them up to 11, because that’s his whole thing; he’s the guy who delivers loud, dumb fun. It’s just that this one was smart, too, and after almost thirty years it deserves a second chance to find its audience.

Arrow’s new 4K release – on UHD only, no Blu-ray has been announced – is immediately the definitive special edition of The Long Kiss Goodnight, rolling out a new UHD restoration that looks exactly like a fresh 35mm print. Guillermo Navarro shot the picture in Super 35, so the negative doesn’t have the distinctive look of a true scope production, but the tones are just right – the slightly muted palette of the wintry small town giving way to the gaudier settings of Atlantic City and Niagara Falls for the climax. (The whole thing was shot in Toronto, but that’s its own kind of fun.)

Neither New Line’s original DVD release nor Warner’s Blu-ray offered anything in the way of special features beyond a trailer which sold the picture as a straight shoot-em-up, with spoilers aplenty, which makes Arrow’s supplemental package all the more impressive. After the bang-up job the label did with Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea just last month, I guess I’m not totally surprised.

Two new audio commentaries – one from Film Freak Central’s Walter Chaw, the other from Bloodhaus hosts Drusilla Adeline and Joshua Conke – are included on the feature disc, along with the trailer and an image gallery. The special features Blu-ray kicks off with new interviews with stunt coordinator Steve Davidson (“Symphony of Destruction”) and makeup artist Gordon J. Smith (“Long Live the New Flesh”), celebrating the bygone days of fully practical effects work. (It still feels weird that Harlin made the heavily digital Deep Blue Sea just three years later, you know?) And a catch-up with Yvonne Zima, who plays Davis’ daughter in the film, offers some terrific on-set footage of Davis doing her own stunts in the film’s climax.

Arrow also commissioned three new video essays: Josh Nelson’s “Amnesia Chick” and Howard S. Berger “The Mirror Crack’d” look at the movie’s use of familiar tropes – amnesia in the former, dopplegangers in the latter – while Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’ “A Woman’s World” examines Geena Davis’ dual performance through the prism of her entire career.

The rest is archival material: Grainy interviews, B-roll and making-of material from the EPK, and two “deleted scenes” that are actually extended versions of two of the film’s many action sequences. I will not spoil them for you, other than to say even Renny Harlin knows when he’s gone too far. Sometimes.

Arrow Video’s 4K special edition of The Long Kiss Goodnight is available now; in Canada, you can find it at Unobstructed View.

Oh, and happy National Canadian Film Day, everybody!