We don’t love remakes. For every decent one like Scarface (Al Pacino) or The Thing (Kurt Russell) there is The Crow (Bill Skarsgård) or Ghostbusters: Answer the Call. But Hollywood loves them and every week there is a rumor or news on the latest one in production. Most are completely unnecessary, but if they are going to continue to get made, let’s have some fun coming up with remakes that might at least be watchable.
I recently watched Arrow Video’s 4K release of Renny Harlin’s 1990s action flick The Long Kiss Goodnight. Back in the day it was a fun movie that saw Geena Davis earn a spot at the table of lead actresses doing action as a former gun for hire turned teacher/mom. As fun as it is, one thing that stood out while watching it was how dated it felt. The CGI and special effects really looked their age and the action set pieces also felt stale because of how far we’ve come because of John Wick and the like. I sat there thinking about a remake and who would star in it and who would make it so I decided to come up with this new series for The Nerds Templar.
When I was first thinking about mid 30s to early 40s actresses of today names like Dakota Johnson and Mary Elizabeth Winstead came to mind. Then I remembered that Geena Davis is awfully tall. There’s a tall actress of today that I’ve been a fan of since she first traveled space and time with The Doctor and that’s Karen Gillan. With the Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers flicks she’s done fight choreography before. Plus she’s already played an assassin in Gunpowder Milkshake. In The Long Kiss Goodnight Davis plays an assassin with memory loss who becomes a small town teacher and mother. Gillan recently became a mom in real life and I think she’d be perfect for the remake.
Samuel L. Jackson plays a wise-cracking sidekick opposite Geena Davis in the original film. Before he was handed the shield from Captain America, the best best wisecracking sidekick of today was Sam Wilson played by Anthony Mackie. Like Gillan, Mackie has plenty of fight choreography training from his MCU days. He’s quick with a joke and has handled plenty of guns. He could easily fill Jackson’s shoes as the former cop turned private investigator.
Craig Bierko plays the good looking bad guy who’s hunting down the Geena Davis character. By the film’s end it turns out he’s working with the government trying to tie up loose ends. Glen Powell is one of the hottest names in Hollywood and plays good looking with ease, but it’s time to dirty him up. Whether it was Top Gun Maverick or Twisters, Powell has been easy to root for. He’s ready for a bad guy role. Bierko’s character has a sexual past with Davis and you can easily see Powell and Gillan having that type of past.
Brian Cox plays a doctor who is sort of a handler for Davis. He knows her past and knows who her last target was. Succession proved Cox still very much has it, but we do need to bring the character down in age. One of my favorite actors who doesn’t get the credit he deserves is Donal Logue. Logue would crush the doctor character and could probably do a bit more action than Cox did. Donal is too nice of a guy to give him the watery grave Cox’s character got though.
Since the 1990s we’ve come a long way with action flicks. Gone are the big over-the-top Michael Bay type films although I still love them. Nowadays we get more realistic, close quarter hand-to-hand fight sequences, John Wick, Nobody, Violent Night, Atomic Blonde, Love Hurts, all movies associated with Chad Stahelski or David Leitch. Leitch’s 87North Productions would bring a fantastic new realism to the action while still paying homage to the stunt work of the 1990s which both men have experience with. The Long Kiss Goodnight had the iconic building jump into the ice below with Davis shooting through it and I always loved the water torture scene. If you keep those types of sequences, but make the chase sequences and shootouts believable you’d have a less outdated film. I think Gillan could handle one-on-one fights and use her height/legs to showcase female lead choreography, kind of what I’m hoping to see in Ballerina (another 87North production). Renny Harlin has made some great action movies and with this being a memory loss assassin film it would be very updatable for an audience that grew up on the Jason Bourne flicks and the John Wick universe.
So what do you think? Would you watch a remake of The Long Kiss Goodnight? What do you think of the original Renny Harlin film that starred Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson?
The Nerds Templar 