At long last, "The Long Kiss Goodnight" is getting the holiday affection it deserves

When I wrote about my abiding love for "The Long Kiss Goodnight" in 2016, it wasn't widely known or easy to find. Unless you owned or wanted to buy the DVD, you were out of luck. A viewing wasn't even obtainable on a streaming service, whether for the price of a subscription or rental fee.

Sometime after that, a miracle manifested. One of its stars, Samuel L. Jackson, started bumping it on social media on the rare occasions that it would show up as a rerun. Jackson is eternally popular and remains Hollywood's most bankable actors, but this wasn't a favor as much as it was a flex. In a 2018 episode of GQ's video series "Actually Me" he declared without prompting that "The Long Kiss Goodnight" is his favorite movie to watch that he also stars in.

To that his character Mitch Hennessey would likely reply, "No s**t." Mitch receives most of the love expressed for this movie, but Geena Davis' performance is the main course in its action chow-down. Jackson probably wouldn't disagree with that, since Mitch, a former cop turned low-rent private investigator, exists firmly within Jackson's wheelhouse of bad muthaf*****s. He's a little shabby and misogynistic, but also a loyal, determined friend, and casually hilarious without having to work at it.

Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson in "The Long Kiss Goodnight" 1996 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In contrast, Davis' Charly Baltimore was an unexpected direction for an Academy Award-winning performer best known for her blazing turn in "Thelma & Louise." Charlene Baltimore, a counter-assassination specialist and deep-cover operative for the CIA before she blacks out for the better part of a decade, gave Davis an interesting profile to play with, especially since she doesn't fully emerge until midway through the movie. Beforehand she's an amnesiac schoolteacher named Samantha Caine, a woman with an eight-year-old daughter named Caitlin (Yvonne Zima) and a closet full of frumpy fashion crimes.

A lot can change in a few years. For instance, Jackson's star is as bright as ever, as is that of another "Long Kiss" co-star, Brian Cox, beloved by many for embodying Logan "Go F**k Yourself" Roy on "Succession."

And perhaps entirely by coincidence, but more likely because something changed with its licensing deal, "The Long Kiss Goodnight" became more widely available, and in the nick of time to play a role in the increasingly more frequent conversations about superior Christmas movies that aren't Christmas movies.

The starring titles in those conversations tend to be "Die Hard" and "Lethal Weapon." But "The Long Kiss Goodnight," written by "Lethal Weapon" screenwriter Shane Black, is the most holly-and-ivy forward of these. Black implies as much in a recent interview with Empire Magazine.  

"There's an element of 'It's A Wonderful Life,' where she's living out this life, and she had to forget that she's a killer in order to do it," he tells Empire. "Christmas is the perfect time for that suburban housewife, it's the perfect fantasy to pursue. 'What if I was just someone making Christmas cookies? What if I was buying gifts instead of knives and guns?'"

That's how Charly spends her days when we meet her, not as herself: Samantha is the type of woman who plays Mrs. Claus in the Christmas parade, wears twinkly earrings and shapeless sweaters, and bakes cookies for the PTA. And she would have been content living her Hallmark life in small-town Pennsylvania with her super-nice partner Hal (Tom Amandes) if she had never hit her head in a car wreck.

Geena Davis struggling to pull away from Craig Bierko, who has a grab on her in a scene from the film 'Long Kiss Goodnight', 1996. (New Line Cinema/Getty Images)

She crashes her car into a deer that happened to be in the middle of the icy road, but the true cause is the old drunk man who tries to cop a feel while Samantha's driving. That makes the deer collateral damage, which a momentarily emerged Charly puts out of its misery with her bare hands. The lecher, being precisely the type of guy who would have lost a hand if he'd pulled anything with her, is left in the burning wreck and never spoken of again.

Christmas is mainly a visually dissonant, cheery backdrop to the bullets and adrenaline spurring all of Roger Murtaugh's, Martin Riggs' and John McClane's running and gunning. But the action in "The Long Kiss Goodnight" begins at home and during the holidays. A homicidal heavy shows up on the heroine's doorstep, hiding among carolers with a shotgun in hand. Sam's in her pajamas and robe; he's ready to blow her head off. He doesn't fathom that she'll knock him out with a baked Alaska before she snaps his neck.

Charly was going to resurface in any case, any time. The mission just happened to be set not merely around Christmastime, but on Christmas day: the climax involves Charly interrupting a Christmas parade to save a small town on the Canadian border (that Black envisioned as a double for Whoville) from being blown off the map.

This plot is ridiculous, no question, and not any more than many action stories from that era. "The Long Kiss Goodnight" came out in October of the same year as "Independence Day," "Broken Arrow" and "Mission: Impossible," elbowing its way into a blockbuster space dominated at that time by Nicolas Cage, John Travolta and Tom Cruise. Jackson wasn't exactly slouching in the marquee actor crowd either, having co-starred with Bruce Willis in "Die Hard: With a Vengeance" a year earlier.

Paired with Davis, he gets to work with funnier lines and flaunt an impressive level of chemistry. 

One might surmise that if Davis weren't married to "Die Hard 2" and "Cliffhanger" director Renny Harlin, who directed "Long Kiss," Davis might have steered clear of the action genre entirely. But you can tell she poured herself into becoming her hard-hitting heroine emotionally and physically, doing many of her own stunts and diving into her character's emotional dexterity.

Geena Davis in "The Long Kiss Goodnight" 1996 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)Charly reasserts her inner steel and her worth by saving herself – and America! – but it also sprouts from her inner conflict over being a mother, a role the spy never intended to take on. Charly is a manifestation of every woman's secret or sublimated wild side, which is what makes her Atlantic City D.I.Y. makeover so thrilling.

And yet, who is Christmas for if not children, actual and the ones at heart? Charly's choice to embrace Samantha as a part of her rescues her and Caitlin in a crucial moment where their lives depend on Charly's ability to make a baby doll into a weapon, and Caitlin's faith that her mom would come back to her. In the same way, the holiday survivor in Sam – Charly – instills in her daughter what becomes one of the movie's signature hero lines: "Life is pain. You just get used to it!"

If equality reigned, Charlene Baltimore would have made Davis an action star. This forgets that all things are not equal, which Davis never did. Eight years after "The Long Kiss Goodnight" came out, she founded the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, whose mission statement describes a dedication to "working collaboratively within the entertainment industry to create gender balance, foster inclusion and reduce negative stereotyping in family entertainment media." She also released a new memoir titled, appropriately "Dying of Politeness."

That means Davis is a woman of action in real life, creating her own lasting and impactful gift to popular culture. Hopefully her accomplishments and those of her co-stars keep Charly Baltimore's  legacy alive and elevate her effort to where it deserves to be in the Favorite Christmas Movies pantheon. If that happens, it'll be an unexpected holiday present worth celebrating year round. 

"The Long Kiss Goodnight" airs at 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 27, and 11:30 am Saturday, Dec. 31 on Showtime. It's also available to stream on Showtime's streaming service and can be rented or purchased through Amazon Prime.