YMMV / The Long Kiss Goodnight

• Complete Monster: Timothy is a sociopathic psychological operations agent who's the former lover, and target, of the amnesiac heroine. Early on, we see Timothy torturing a man who, knowing his reputation, just begs for a quick death. Timothy doesn't grant it. When pursuing his ex, Charlie, she uncovers his plan with his Knight Templar boss: to stage a terrorist attack and kill over four thousand Americans to "blame the Muslims" and get funding. While Leland is doing what he sees as right for the country in the end, Timothy is in for the money and the fun. When he has Charlie hostage with her 8-year-old daughter, he plans to throw them in a meat locker to freeze to death. Charlie informs him the girl, Caitlin, is Timothy's child. He confirms this by seeing she has his eyes—and then angrily locks her in the meat locker to die anyways.
• Cult Classic: Although the film bombed at the box office, it does have a fanbase who consider it to be a very memorable action film with funny, clever dialogue.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Mr. Waldman, played by Brian Cox. He has about twenty minutes of screentime and gets the best lines in the movie.
• Genius Bonus: In one scene the President of the United States mentions that Chapter's missing agent (Charly) was trained in "counter-assassination". This may seem odd, since Charly is a straight-up assassin. However, in 1976 Gerald Ford authorized an executive order that forbade U.S. intelligence agencies from taking part in assassinations. If Perkins told the President that Charly was an assassin he'd be admitting to breaking the law. But by telling the President that Charly was a "counter-assassination specialist" he would avoid implicating himself.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The villains' plan eerily echoes any number of conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks being a False Flag Operation, from the idea of framing radical Islamic terrorists for it to a specific reference to a previous attempt to blow up the World Trade Center.
  Leland: 1993. World Trade Center bombing, remember? During the trial, one of the bombers claimed the CIA had advanced knowledge. The diplomat who issued the terrorists' visas was CIA. It's not unthinkable that they paved the way for the bombing, purely to justify a budget increase.
  Mitch: You're telling me that you're going to fake some terrorist thing, just to scare some money out of Congress?
  Leland: Well, unfortunately, Mr. Hennessey, I have no idea how to fake killing four thousand people, so we're just going to have to do it for real. Blame it on the Muslims, naturally. Then I get my funding.
  • The film employs Good Adultery, Bad Adultery to justify Samantha cheating on her fiance in her Charly persona. It's a little sad to watch knowing the movie was directed by Geena Davis' husband Renny Harlin, and the failure at the Box Office was what destroyed their marriage.
• Ham and Cheese: Craig Bierko is clearly having a great time making Timothy so cartoonishly evil. That being said, he does get serious when he wants to provide Nightmare Fuel ("I'll blind your kid and shoot out both her kneecaps").
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • At the Christmas party, Sam tells the boy Raymond "they'll never find the body" if she catches him smoking again (she's joking). It's used for a Brick Joke later when Charly finds Raymond smoking. The line does become this once it's revealed she used to be an assassin - and a heavy smoker at that.
  • Brian Cox plays the former boss of a now-amnesiac government-trained professional killer, something he would repeat twice.
  • Geena Davis turns down an opportunity to work with the government, speaking to the president personally. She'd later star in Commander in Chief - about a woman who becomes president.
  • If you watch The Negotiator right after this, you'll see David Morse (Daedalus) playing an antagonistic role to Samuel L. Jackson once again. This time his character has an inexplicable hatred of Samuel L's, making it looks like Daedalus survived and is getting revenge on Mitch.
  • For that matter, this isn't the last time Jackson would play a character teamed up with an amnesiac, powerful woman trying to figure out her past: Captain Marvel is even set in The '90s!
• Hollywood Pudgy: Charly wails about how much weight she gained as Samantha, particularly in the ass. In the scene itself she's switched to skintight clothes, showing off that she's in great shape. Possibly just her being overly hard on her appearance. Waldman almost comments on her weight, but given that he's frustrated with Charly's re-emergence, he could also exaggerating.
• Moral Event Horizon: Timothy was always a nasty piece of work but it's only after he decides to let Caitilin to feeze to death along with Charly even after realizing she's his own daughter that we have the confirm of what a unrepentant and psychopathic monster he really is.
• Narm:
  • Charly telling Timothy to look into Caitlin's eyes to confirm that he's actually her father. When Timothy does, he's momentarily shocked and stunned. However he has completely different eyes from the girl (they're not even the same color), and it's blatantly obvious.
  • In the flashback, Timothy referring to Charly as "the Energizer Bunny". Doubly so with hindsight that the Energizer Bunny didn't actually exist when he's supposed to have said that line.
• Narm Charm: Some of the film's more over-the-top sequences are clearly meant to be so ridiculous they're awesome. For example Charly outrunning the car on ice skates. Also the scene where Mitch is dumped out of the car, he remains on the road, lights a cigarette and Charly comes back to pick him up.
• Nightmare Fuel: Besides whenever Charly regains her memories, the sudden sight of Waldman's dead and drowned body is uncanny at best, creepy at worst.
• Paranoia Fuel: The scene where someone is shot through the eye and killed while looking through a peephole can invoke this for more paranoid people since such a thing could technically happen in real life. It might make them more cautious to look through peepholes.
• Vindicated by History: A Box Office Bomb that was mostly ignored on its initial release, its fans have grown since then - as well as appreciation for the fact that it was a female-led action movie that didn't fall into the Girl-Show Ghetto. A sequel was even talked about in 2007, though it never materialised.

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