Physical Specimens: New 4K Reviews, Including The Long Kiss Goodnight, Thirst, and Don’t Torture a Duckling
This week in Physical Specimens, our biweekly round-up of new physical media and 4K reviews, we assess new 4K UHD releases of the most lucrative screenplay of 1994, a brutal giallo from the early ’70s, and two cult Australian reissues from Arrow Video.
The Long Kiss Goodnight
There’s one single reason I had never watched The Long Kiss Goodnight before Arrow’s new 4K release: because, when I was a freshman in college, in the screenwriting program at a major East Coast film school, my adviser would not shut the hell up about how much money Shane Black got paid to write it. I thought his job was to help me learn how to write screenplays, but apparently he thought his job was exclusively to explain the business side of things in the vaguest and least helpful way possible; I heard the words “single screen credit” more in those nine months than I have in the rest of my years combined. Black, the writer of Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, got a cool four million—in 1994 bucks—for his script about an amnesiac suburban mom who was actually a CIA super-spy, and director Renny Harlin—fresh off one of the most catastrophic flops ever, Cutthorat Island, which dealt a killing blow to beleagured studio Carolco—turned it into a cult favorite action film starring his then-wife Geena Davis. It wasn’t a big hit at the time, but guess what: it’s totally okay! Almost fine, even.
Black has gone on to better work, starting with his directorial debut, 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but his signature mix of comedy and violence was already in full effect by The Long Kiss Goodnight. Early scenes where Davis’s slowly returning memories start to wreak havoc in her mundane daily life are an effectively funny example of the “normal person does abnormal things” trope, and Samuel L. Jackson, already in his late 40s but still early in his career as a legitimate movie star, brings dignity, intelligence, and, yes, humor to what could’ve been a thankless sidekick role. Bryan Cox, meanwhile, is immediately fantastic as one of his typically imperious, pretentious, blowhard assholes, only this time on the side of the angels as Davis’s old handler.
The Long Kiss Goodnight is quick and quippy and legitimately good at both—a Black hallmark—but the most impressive thing about it is how it basically predicts every single post-9/11 conspiracy theory, five years early. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing leading to an inevitable follow-up attack? America’s political establishment using that follow-up as justification for invasions of unrelated Middle Eastern countries, pitching crass corporate concerns as pure patriotism? Black almost seems like a prophet today.
There are flaws. It’s a little too long, the action—generally excellent and genuinely thrilling early on—becomes overbearing in the way most action movies since the ‘90s do, and Craig Bierko just doesn’t have the juice as Davis’s main rival. This isn’t a classic, but it’s a better-than-average action flick from the era when action flicks started to become too overwrought and grandiose. And Davis is a true star in it; it’s a shame she didn’t headline a string of breezy action movies after this one—and an absolute indictment of Hollywood’s bullshit that the only movies she made in the 13 years after this were the Stuart Little trilogy. (Yes, there were somehow three of them.) If you dig Black’s later movies, which include Iron Man 3 and the impeccable The Nice Guys, or want to see Davis and Jackson at their peak, seek this one out.
The Long Kiss Goodnight
Original Release: 1996
Director: Renny Harlin
Format: 4K UHD
Label: Arrow Video
Release Date: April 8, 2025
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