The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

When pressing the play button to watch a movie from 1996, there are limited expectations. A cute lady-teacher with amnesia and a black ex-cop who loves his kid and his ex-wife hates him cliche is nothing unique. After a well filmed car accident (take notes modern movies), memories about her days as a government assassin come back and hires the ex-cop-now-private-detective to help her. So one thing to notice is that Samuel L. Jackson is one of the main characters but not the protagonist and apparently not very bright (still looks bad-ass).

However as the movie goes on you feel that the plot is fair enough typically no plot holes. However, before that sudden clarity, there are a bunch of scenes that make you say “WOW! WHAT DID I SEE! WHAT DID I SEE FROM A MOVIE OF 1996?”. And this is exactly what I personally said multiple times. Gore is also done right which makes it some kind of unsuitable for a child movie.

Continuing to write these words I really do not want to make fun of anything in the movie. The only negative apart from the cliches, is the near-perfect aim from the main characters. Apart from that Mr. Samuel gives “character” with all the meaning of the word to the private detective. Our teacher has an inner conflict, beautifully executed and also uses very clever ways to escape or turn very and I say veeeery difficult situations.

And finally I must say again that all of the action scenes are sweet A.F.. So the final verdict is that this movie is a small gem, being one of these movies that will not change your life but will make your evening or the whole week after.

Favourite quotes:
“Nathan: There may be many reasons not to kill you, but among them is not that you’ll be missed by NASA.”
“Mitch: Tell me, old man, how many of those things you got? Nathan: Three: one shoulder, one hip, and one right here next to Mr. Wally, where most pat-downs never reveal it, as an agent’s often reluctant to feel up another man’s groin. Any other questions? Mitch: Yeah! What’s the weather like on your planet?”