Each year, there is a prolonged and increasingly irritating debate as to whether certain films count as “Christmas movies” or not. There are the uncontroversial choices—Elf, Miracle On 34th Street, It’s A Wonderful Life and the like—and then someone will get hung up on whether Die Hard or Bad Santa can truly be classed as a festive picture or whether it has contravened some unwritten rule that insists that the only true Christmas movies are those that major in redemption, peace on Earth and goodwill to all men.
These are qualities seldom found in the oeuvre of the writer-director Shane Black. Today his career is no longer what it was—his last picture, The Predator (2018), was a flop, and his forthcoming Mark Wahlberg-starring Play Dirty seems fated to debut on a streaming service—but at his peak, between 1987’s Lethal Weapon and 2016’s still-undervalued The Nice Guys, Black established himself as Hollywood’s premier purveyor of blockbuster thrills leavened with jet-black humour. And, almost invariably, these pictures were set in the festive season, too.
Black justified this by saying, “Christmas represents a little stutter in the march of days, a hush in which we have a chance to assess and retrospect our lives. I tend to think also that it just informs as a backdrop.” Various pictures of his, such as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) and Iron Man 3 (2013), make entertaining, if occasionally gimmicky, use of the period. But perhaps the most enjoyable Christmas-themed film that Black ever wrote—and one that is criminally underrated to this day—was the Renny Harlin-directed 1996 action-comedy The Long Kiss Goodnight.
The Long Kiss Goodnight’s fortunes were poisoned from the start by two pieces of news that overshadowed the film itself. Firstly, Black had been paid a record $4 million for his script in 1994: big money for an original screenplay now, unheard-of riches back then. The jealous sharpened their knives—and pens. And, secondly, the married duo of Harlin and Geena Davis were coming off one of the most egregious flops of modern times in the form of the pirate adventure Cutthroat Island, which received a token release the previous Christmas, after a barrage of bad publicity, and promptly sank. Although The Long Kiss Goodnight was a greater financial success, its $95 million worldwide gross was far too low to justify its $65 million budget, and so it has—unfairly—been consigned to the cinematic wasteland.
Viewed nearly three decades after its initial release, it’s clear that this is A Shane Black Film, and that all Harlin—a talented journeyman director who never made another major film after 1999’s shark thriller The Deep Blue Sea—was responsible for was co-ordinating the suitably huge action set-pieces and putting the whole thing together. Still, it makes sense: if you’ve paid $4 million for a script—and given the screenwriter a producer credit in the bargain—you’re hardly going to want to mess around with it.
We know from the opening that we’re in for a treat, as Davis’s milquetoast “Samantha Caine”—a Pennsylvania schoolteacher living with her daughter and profoundly drippy fiancé—rediscovers unexpected knife skills after a mild car crash. And then the body count begins rising; Samuel L Jackson’s hilariously low-rent PI, Mitch Hennessy comes, on the scene; and—in a twist shamelessly ripped off by Matthew Vaughn’s inferior Argyle (2024)—it transpires that Davis is in fact an elite CIA assassin, Charly Baltimore, who was, à la Jason Bourne, washed up and amnesiac (and also, unlike Bourne, pregnant) after being involved in some unsavoury piece of CIA false-flag malfeasance.
As usual with Black, the storyline is excessively complicated to a fault, though you’re not watching this for the plot, but for the one-liners—and here it excels. The chemistry between a never better (and never funnier) Davis and the appealingly hangdog Jackson sparks throughout, whether it’s Hennessy complaining that “When we first met, you were all like ‘Oh phooey, I burned the damn muffins’. Now, you go into a bar, ten minutes later, sailors come running out!” or Davis-as-Baltimore declaring, “I got myself out of Beirut once, I think I can get out of New Jersey,” only for Hennessy to remind her that “Others have tried, and failed. The entire population, in fact.” But this is a film that spreads the love around its excellent supporting cast: the likes of Brian Cox, David Morse and a devilishly suave Craig Bierko.
By the time the explosive yet goofily charming conclusion rolls around—amidst the death and destruction, Davis cheerfully asks her daughter, “Shall we get a dog?”—it is hard not to feel that you are watching a bona fide cult classic. Yet, unfortunately, even that destiny still awaits Black’s film, and The Long Kiss Goodnight remains a hidden, unheralded pleasure. Take it from me, though: if you’re looking for a festive-themed thriller with a side order of dark fun, you won’t do any better than this particular Christmas movie.
