Genre: Action-Adventure with traces of comedy
Premise: Sam Caine is a house mom and amnesia. She leads a quiet life until she's attacked by a mugger and dispenses him with lethal force. She hires a private investigator named Henessey to help figure out her past. Turns out Sam Caine is really Charly, a CIA counter assassin, and along with Henessey she sets out to thwart a mission which involves the kidnapping of her daughter.
About: The script was the third, and highest point of Shane Black's sold specs during his reign in the nineties. $125,000 for Lethal Weapon, $1.75 million for The Last Boy Scout, and finally $4 million for The Long Kiss Goodnight. $4 million. That's close to the all time screenwriting record. Sadly, this script has a reputation as the one that finally broke Black's heart about the industry and sent him into a near decade of low visibility.
Writer: Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and Monster Squad at this point) has sold screenwriting credit. It would be his last film until Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang.
There's a series of mediocre action blockbusters from the mid-nineties which I have a fondness for because I watched them with my dad: The Rock, Con Air, and The Long Kiss Goodnight. I caught this film on cable a year or two ago, and watched a good chunk of it. And, it's not bad. Long Kiss is no Cut Throat Island. But, it has a reputation as having been so different than Shane Black's original version. I wanted to see what the real story was. I wasn't able to get my hands on the original draft, but I did locate a second draft of the film. And in all honesty, it really isn't all that different from what ended up on the screen.
There is absolutely no substance behind this story. It's a sequence of animated, comic book influenced sequences which if you cut them for meaning bleed absolutely nothing. And that from the man who wrote the crazy cop circular existentialist dialogue of Lethal Weapon. I have no idea how Sam Caine feels about her past life. Or what her major problem is with this one. So when she discovers she's a spy and commits to finding out what's going on, there is nothing whatsoever to commit to in terms of character or expectations. So why are we watching this? Well, for the action sequences. Of course.
Only the action of this script is a long, circular winding snake of a tale and it even goes so far as to suspend belief in reality over multiple occasions (like the characters out running a fire ball). There's nothing we really haven't seen her in terms of action before, and it's not escalating to anything larger. Just like a series of random comic book mishaps. And really, a Hollywood film that does not make.
Now don't get me wrong, there's plenty of snappy dialogue thrown in. But it's not intended to reveal character. Light quips. Characters digging into one another. But Henessey/Charly have a much more artifical uncomplicated relationship as oppposed to Briggs/Murphy which is essentially the whole reason Lethal Weapon works as a film. We commit the characters. This thing, however, reads like it was written to fool a Hollywood reader and slip past the gates with just enough charm to get sold, but never really enough power to make a good film.
And as if you didn't see it coming, although The Long Kiss Goodnight takes place during Christmas (with Sam Caine playing Ms. Clause in the beginning) there really is absolutely no reason for this film to take place during Christmas and it makes no effort to craft a message from that. It's just nothing more than a story with some action pieces set in the winter. So I'm really sorry that Shane Black left the industry, but I highly doubt this script got turned to completely meaningless drivel with one draft. So I'm going to go out on another ledge here and say perhaps it's more likely that Shane Black left Hollywood because of his own personal reasons, and although this film was directed by Renny Harlin (Cut Throat Island, Cliffhanger, need I say more?) it wasn't shining even in early draft form.
What I Learned: I can honestly say I learned nothing from this script. Nothing positive at least. It is a shame that a screenwriter as talented as Shane Black could produce this drivel.
Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)
[X] - Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)
Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)
Hot Rod (Good)
Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)
Isla Prospect: No. But. I want to take a moment of silence in respect to Geena Davis who was in such great films as The Accidental Tourist, The Fly, Tootsie, and League of Their Own before being subject to crap like this, Cut Throat Island, Speechless and Stuart Little.
Script Link: I have a copy I acquired which is an early draft, but there are later version to be found on numerous sites across the web.
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