The ups and downs of Renny Harlin’s career is pretty amazing and demands further investigation in the future. How does one recover from Cutthroat Island? As we brace for Harlin to make a return with a new The Strangers movie in 2024, this project needs to come to life.

Until then, The Long Kiss Goodnight.

Harlin and his leading lady, Geena David, were married from 1993 to 1998, but she filed for divorce shortly after her personal secretary, Tiffany Bowne, gave birth to Harlin’s first child, Luukas “Luke” Harlin in August 1997. As the time lines up, some of that affair was during the making of this film. I don’t know how that colors your enjoyment of this film.

It did well — but writer Shane Black wondering if it would have done better with a male lead — and some of that is because their past film, the previously mentioned Cutthroat Island, did so bad.

Davis has a fascinating career as well, She told Vulture in 2016, “Film roles really did start to dry up when I got into my 40s. If you look at IMDb, up until that age, I made roughly one film a year. In my entire 40s, I made one movie, Stuart Little. I was getting offers, but for nothing meaty or interesting like in my 30s. I’d been completely ruined and spoiled. I mean, I got to play a pirate captain! I got to do every type of role, even if the movie failed.” Yet where I’ve always admired her is that while she’s attractive, that hasn’t been the main reason why she’s been so remembered, starting back in Tootsie.

In this movie, she plays two sides of the female experience: amnesiac good girl schoolteacher Samantha Caine and unstoppable badass Charlene “Charly” Elizabeth Baltimore. She only fully engages in her real Charly self when she’s nearly drowned on a water wheel while completely nude, which seems like a subject drenched with some subtext. Regardless, she’s the capable one of team she forms with Samuel Jackson’s detective, Mitch Henessey. And yet at the end, she is comfortable enough to put that life behind her again — without amnesia leading her to follow that path — and become a partner to a man and a mother.

The real success of the film is that the people who made it loved what they did. It’s one of Jackson’s favorite films he was in to watch — he was killed in the original cut until an audience member loudly protested during an early test viewing — and Davis said, “I love that movie. My character might be my favorite role—it’s a close call between Thelma and that one. Anyway, that movie came out great and got some good reception, but it didn’t soar to heights, let’s say, perhaps as we wanted it to.” As for Harlin, it’s his favorite of his movies, saying, “…it’s just very simple. It’s a movie that had a really good screenplay, which meant that I was able to get really good actors. It’s always challenging to make a movie, but it sure makes it easier when you have a good screenplay like in that one. When you have characters that are complex, and you have good drama and have some humor and some good action, you kind of have all the ingredients. When you have that you don’t even need some crazy special effects — you just need to let the characters do their thing. It was a great experience.”

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of The Long Kiss Goodnight here.