This week I subjected myself to a number of things that ended up being tolerable at best and disappointing at worst. I was honestly thinking I wasn’t going to have anything to write about this week. And then I remembered: there was one truly fantastic treasure from last week that I would be a fool not to rant and rave about.

* * * * *

The Long Kiss Goodnight, or “You’re a Good Man, Shane Black”

In the early 1990s, Shane Black was the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, having penned hits such as Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout. He’s still making movies today, having written and directed 2005’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and last year’s Iron Man 3. For 10 years, though, he had almost nothing to do with Hollywood, because of two huge flops: 1993’s Last Action Hero and 1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight. While Last Action Hero is legitimately not a very good movie — it’s got a couple of good moments but it’s generally a huge mess — The Long Kiss Goodnight is a movie that I have always liked, and did not deserve to fail as loudly as it did.

For those who haven’t seen it, The Long Kiss Goodnight is about Samantha Caine, an amnesiac schoolteacher who only remembers the last eight years of her life. She’s hired a series of private detectives to find any information on her past life, but after eight years she’s basically given up on finding out who she was until she hits her head in a car accident and memories start coming back to her, as well as some odd skills and personality quirks. Then she’s attacked in her home by a man who broke out of prison after seeing footage of her on the local news. That’s when Samantha and Mitch Henessey, her current private detective, go out to find who she is once and for all. Turns out she’s a spy named Charlie Baltimore, and everyone thought she was dead. Now that she’s resurfaced, she has a lot of people trying to kill her.

The movie has a lot going for it. Black’s script, which he admits had been re-written by script doctors, is action-packed and full of incredibly smart, quotable lines. The spectacular Geena Davis is Samantha/Charlie, and she’s great as both characters. It seems that she’s having more fun as Charlie, but I think I too would prefer playing the badass sexy spy than the PTA member myself. She’s also a great acting partner for Samuel L. Jackson as Mitch Henessey, who steals the show. Jackson’s Mitch Henessey is a slimy loser who finds himself in over his head incredibly quickly, and ends up in the unlikely role of Charlie Baltimore’s conscience. He gets most of the best lines partly because the character is interesting and partly because Jackson delivers them so well. He’s not cool, he’s not stylish and he’s not particularly clever — he’s an everyman with questionable ethics and a talented scriptwriter. Watching the two of them change and grow as characters over the course of the movie is really satisfying; I find it rare to have interesting, fully realized characters in action extravaganzas. One of the reasons that I find them compelling is that they’re unapologetically flawed and yet have an honest core. Their flaws don’t negate their strength, they exist in tandem with it, which is something I find lacking in a lot of modern action protagonists.

Even the action is pretty good, which is surprising because I generally find director Renny Harlin hacky and uninspired. He has a decent eye for explosions, and when given a set piece can generally figure out how to film it to good effect, but I can’t help thinking how much more exciting those scenes would be in more skilled hands. His quieter moments are filmed with neither style nor creativity: point, shoot, let the actors speak. Luckily, this workmanlike approach highlights the film’s strengths, namely the writing and the acting. That’s how good The Long Kiss Goodnight is — not even Harlin can destroy its promise. Where it succeeds, it succeeds despite him, not because of him.

It’s not a perfect movie, but I am a solid advocate for The Long Kiss Goodnight. It’s got everything I want from an action movie except for an abundance of visual style, and when there is everything else, I’m happy to overlook it.

* * * * *

That’s it for me this week. My hope is that I have more good things to talk about next week; maybe the last seven episodes of BoJack Horseman will get substantially better and I can rave about them. (I keep getting told that it gets much better after the first couple of episodes. I have yet to find that to be the case.) If not, though, I’ll do my best to find something else worth your while. I’ll see you in seven days.