The Long Kiss Goodnight

About The Long Kiss Goodnight

The Long Kiss Goodnight is a 1996 action thriller film starring Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson, written by Shane Black and directed by Renny Harlin.

Samantha Caine (Geena Davis) is a suburban mother and schoolteacher with a seemingly normal life in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. However, she had been found badly injured and amnesiatic several years previously, and has no memory of her past. When she's attacked by an escaped convict, Samantha dispatches her attacker with lethal self-defense skills she wasn't aware she possessed. She hires wisecracking private investigator Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) to help her find the truth about her past. She contacts the mysterious Dr. Nathan Waldman (Brian Cox) who reveals that Samantha is really Charly Baltimore, an assassin for the CIA who went missing eight years ago. When Samantha is captured and tortured by some of her old enemies, "Charly", previously dormant, resurfaces. She discovers that her former boss at the CIA, Leland Perkins (Patrick Malahide) has allied with a psychotic ops specialist named Timothy (Craig Bierko) in a false flag plot to detonate a chemical bomb in downtown Niagara Falls, New York, frame Islamic terrorists for the crime and thus secure more funding. She and Mitch set out to thwart the plot and rescue her young daughter, Caitlin (Yvonne Zima) from the clutches of the terrorists.

The screenplay was written by Shane Black, who was at the start of the 1990s one of the highest-paid scriptwriters in Hollywood.