when you're doing a video series like real action you can never go too long without
mentioning shane black and when it comes to christmas action movies shane black is the guy
to turn to the holiday spirit brought us our video on the last boy scout this time last year and this
time the yuletide tidings bring us another shane black classic the long kiss good night
it's funny that we don't think of the long kiss goodnight as a christmas movie the way we
famously argue about die hard all the time but that's okay for guys like me and probably you
if you're watching this video it's absolutely an annual favorite around this time the film starred
gina davis as samantha kane a small town school teacher who woke up with amnesia eight years ago
with no memory of who she was she still manages to build a life with a loyal husband and young
daughter that is until she discovers that she was actually one of the world's best assassins
and she's being hunted by her former employers the only way to save herself and her family
is to hit the road with dubious private eye mitch hennessy
played by the untouchably cool samuel l jackson and learned the truth about her
past we'll come back to why samuel l jackson is so untouchable in this film a bit later
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the long kiss goodnight wasn't just another action movie with gina davis as the star
playing a role traditionally designed for a man the film was a rarity and a ballsy gamble
davis also would have seemed like an unlikely pick for this type of flick
but then she was married at the time to director renny harlan the guy behind die hard 2 the
adventures of fort fairlane and cliffhanger um he was also the director of cutthroat island
an infamous big budget pirate movie known for being an epic flop that destroyed careers
davis starred in that too and its impact on the long kids goodnight would be felt and not in a
good way but the long kids goodnight is insanely good with harlan doing some of his career's best
work using the icy setting to let davis pull off some really crazy stuff on ice skates tanya
harding ain't got nothing on her man suck my dick what i love about it is that it's basically many
movies rolled into one you've got the crazy explosive over-the-top action that harlan
really excelled at and this dynamic killer lead performance from davis she was really built for
doing this kind of role and it's a shame we never got to see more of her doing it you also get this
great complex script from black to find samantha slowly figuring out aspects of her past ultimately
revealing itself in the form of a buried persona that of lethal assassin charlie baltimore one of
my favorite scenes ever has samantha who at this point knows nothing of who she used to be suddenly
figuring out that she's got knife skills that would put an iron chef to shame as veggies get
sliced and diced what starts off as an innocent revelation turns dark as she throws a blade
right through the heart of a tomato leaving her family stunned there are lots of little moments
like this that allow davis to play a pretty complicated character juggling the innocence
of samantha with the untamed charlie whose sex appeal is as deadly as her skills with a blade
and this being a shane black flick she's got some hellified zingers too
lady how about some company no thanks i'm saving myself till i get raped
but let's talk about davis's co-star niss the great samuel l jackson the mitch hennessey
character might be his best ever and that's saying something when you think about his roles
in pulp fiction star wars he was a freaking jedi nick fury and mcu and even shaft shaft
and that's not just me being hyperbolic mitch is also jackson's favorite character in a 2018
interview with the undefeated jackson listed mitch at the top of his 20 all-time favorite
roles and the long kiss goodnight right up there with it quote my dude i love that movie so much
a movie way ahead of its time gina davis awesome charlie baltimore character the studio didn't know
how to market that film because they didn't know that women liked seeing themselves as badasses
i kept saying you need to advertise this thing during the day when women are watching soaps
whatever they were like i don't know what you're talking about jackson would go on to reveal
that in the original version mitch was actually killed off but this threw test audiences into an
outrage on some you can't kill samuel l jackson stuff i mean the audience is like oh hell no
and so they rewrote it to keep mitch around honestly i can't imagine the movie without
him it also makes his line at the explosive ridiculously red hot finale that's right
you can't kill me even more awesome and sort of meta nope they literally can't kill you mitch
this is his escape shoot right here he's mean quick and you don't take no
[ __ ] either right you can shoot at the guards with his arrow right here
it's cool huh todd time for dinner mitch is cool because he starts off as this shady pi
barely more than a petty criminal we think we've got him pegged
because he puts himself down as someone who has never done anything right in his life
but as samantha begins to change from a naive housewife into a hardened killer
mitch basically takes the opposite track and becomes this indispensable protective friend
he's still a smart ass of course you're always the stupidity did you take lessons i took lessons and
this was all by design in black's brilliant script the film is exactly 120 minutes long
and at exactly the 60 minute mark the samantha we knew is gone and she's fully charlie baltimore it
sets up what is a completely different second half of the film where she and mitch go on the offense
no longer running from her past and the government goons on their trail speaking of which the cast
surrounding davis and jackson is pretty awesome too you've got brian cox who's great in everything
david morse one of my favorite douchebag character actors craig bjerko what a scumbag
his government agent timothy is throughout this film man matching charlie in just pure psychosis
sir she's got the truck she's headed out of town i'm hurt real bad i think i'm dying
continue dying out i always thought biarco had one of those
classic faces that you love to hate he was a perfect madman and the right match for davis
you wanted all of the bad things to happen to him you're gonna die screaming
and i'm gonna watch yes all of the bad things and boy does he get it
oh
foreign
don't hit the cars
okay so you might be telling yourself that an action movie about an amnesiac super
agent sounds pretty derivative and maybe you're right the born flicks did it like
five times or something right but this was 1996 and with the female lead the
lone kiss goodnight was something we hadn't really seen before at the time and that may
have been part of why it struggled before becoming the cult classic we know it is today
the long kiss goodnight is famously one of the highest selling scripts of all time
with newline paying black a whopping 4 million the first to ever make that kind of money
my 2 000 ceramic vector my mother got me as a special gift you threw in the lake
next to the car what happens when they drag the lake you think they'll find my pistol
jesus look up idiots in the dictionary you know what you'll find a picture me no the definition
of the word idiot which you [ __ ] are the film opened and made just 33 million in the states
a disappointing number no matter how you slice it while we already know jackson's opinion on why it
underperformed black had his own thoughts saying in an interview quote it might have made more
money they told me but it had to be a woman the lead had to be female quote and maybe that's true
her light was extinguished in the big one of 2010.
but another possible reason had to do with that sinking pirate ship of a movie i mentioned before
cutthroat island released less than a year earlier it is widely considered the biggest box office
bomb ever and led directly to the demise of kuroko pictures and wiped out the entire pirate genre
until it was revived eight years later by pirates of the caribbean so um thanks for that i guess
yes it was very exciting tomorrow we go to the zoo the long kids goodnight would fare much better
overseas where female-led assassin flicks were the norm thank you luke bason and ended up with 95
million dollars worldwide on a 65 million budget black clearly leaves the fate of charlie open
in hopes of a sequel and in 2007 word started to bubble up that it may finally happen jackson
was eager to play mitch again but as for davis well the story wouldn't have called for her to
return at all it would have instead focused on samantha's daughter caitlyn who was played then
by a young ivon zema and who reunited with black for small roles in iron man 3 and the nice guys
caitlyn would seek out mitch to help him find the ones responsible for samantha's death that movie
obviously never happened but i feel like there's always some hope as long as jackson remains up for
it that guy can probably get anything made that he wants so perhaps we don't have to say good
night to the long kiss good night forever the long kiss good night gets 8 out of 10 stallones
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