Have a Filthy Little Christmas: ‘The Long Kiss Goodnight’

Renny Harlin and Shane Black’s 1996 cinematic Christmas carol is a heavy metal of swag, sex, and shotguns

Dec 25, 2025

Call me old-fashioned, but I miss ’90s movies where people smoked like chimneys, everybody drove a grey/hunter green Ford Taurus, and Sam Jackson popped up to say “motherfucker” 17 times on average per role. It was a simpler era where people who drank two vodka tonics per night weren’t called alcoholics, Robert De Niro had only one divorce and still picked great parts, and Shane Black was red-hot to establish himself as the baddest action film screenwriter of his generation.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that The Long Kiss Goodnight is a Christmas Movie™ overdue to have its renaissance as one in the year of 2025.

Die Hard is over-discussed as it is, anyway, so let’s make some room on that holiday watchlist for Renny Harlin’s forgotten rascal of a flick that spews scathing one-liners like a slimline Glock shoots steely Parabellum cartridges into dirtbags.

After opening with some standard saccharine Christmas flair, The Long Kiss… wastes no time to tell you what kind of movie it’s going to be. It takes Black’s screenplay less than seven minutes to intro you to Sam-MFin-Jackson’s P.I., Mitch, who tells his sorry-ass whore-loving subject about all the ways he’s gon’ get ass-fucked if he gives him attitude about the arrest he brought upon himself. It’s all a con (of course) to get some cash out of the poor bastard — the prostitute is Mitch’s “business partner” in crime — and to have the opportunity to send all the kids out of the room before Black and his grimy story really gets into the dirty stuff (and it’ll get foul, don’t you worry). That’s the sort of refreshing honesty up front that action flicks these days rarely treat us with.

But The Long Kiss… — despite my misleading preamble, sorry! — is actually Geena Davis’s film as she turns from innocuous sissy-housewife into ferocious virago. Think Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider times ten plus an R-rated vocabulary. She plays Sam (aka Charly), a mother and wife, who’s been having amnesia for the past eight years and forgot she was a merciless assassin for the government, long thought to be dead. She only needs a reindeer through her car’s windshield to crack something loose in her head and slowly start remembering.

Time is of the essence, though, since a half-eyed criminal recognizes her in the Christmas parade broadcast on Prison TV, and before she knows it, a group of men with questionable backgrounds and courting styles will go after her like starving hyenas. Mitch is hardly capable of protecting her from them, not to mention the task is way beyond his pay grade. But by the time he realizes the big pile of stinking crap they both find themselves in, it’s way too late anyway. And once Sam fully remembers who she was and still is — with all of her survival and weapon-handling skills intact — Harlin and Black shift gears to deliver a bonkers action-fuelled ammo opera.

At almost 30 years old, The Long Kiss… aged as much as a vampire, and that’s being harsh on it. Harlin’s fast-paced direction goes hand in hand with Black’s razor-sharp writing and pitch-black humor, landing a kick in the gut to every culturally sensitive snowflake who makes it a mission to remove the “excessive use of sex scenes” from Looney Tunes and Space Jam. Their movie is aggressively sexy, chauvinistic, yet also unrelenting in its female empowerment, and limitless in pouring highly flammable offense at every damn soul. Essentially, it’s a time capsule shot straight into the bloodstream like cinematic fentanyl, but that’s only half the reason why it’s still a blast of a film.

Harlin’s directorial choices may not always be the most effective here and there, but he understands that injecting adrenaline and well-wrought suspense into every set piece is what sucks the viewer in like an industrial hoover designed by John Woo. With all the hard-boiled and in-your-face action, he delivers a raw yet sleek style of filmmaking that went largely extinct in the past few decades. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore” is the highest praise The Long Kiss… can get from me because it’s unquestionably true. The last time we had anything close to this much unabashed macho fun in an American action flick was probably Black’s very own The Nice Guys, and that was nearly ten years ago.

No doubt, Harlin and Black faltered a lot since hitting their peak in the 90s, but here they fire on all cylinders, throwing slurs, kitchen knives, and boisterous explosions at our every pleasure sense with ease and style in the name of maximalism and mindless entertainment. Yet The Long Kiss… never feels choppy or distasteful, but a carefully orchestrated cult classic from a time where anything and everything was game, and filmmakers didn’t shy away from getting under scrutiny for their full-blown expressions. Action flicks like this may never be in fashion again, but The Long Kiss… sure as hell still feels as good as smoking a red Marlboro and washing it down with a Bud Dry felt in your early 20s, where the present was something you could grab onto with both hands without worrying about tomorrow. That time may be gone now, but Sam Jackson screaming “You can’t kill me, motherfuckers!” will live on forever.