The "lost my memory, but I guess I used to be a badass" story is retold from time to time with varying success. This time it features "GRRRRL power" with Geena Davis, alongside America's favorite profane nigger, Sam Jackson. Welcome to “The Long Kiss Goodnight” from 1996. The premise is basic. The execution is tepid. The missed opportunities are substantial. "Samantha" (not her real name) was found, half-dead, devoid of memories, and pregnant, in a sleepy hamlet. Over the course of the eight years since, she has cultivated a new life as a schoolteacher, raised her daughter, and met a milquetoast fella who lavishes her with adoration. She now enjoys her life as a mommy, teaching elementary kids, paying her mortgage, and ... inexplicably talking about "teenage girl tits" with her fiancee, because that is apparently what passes for the typical behavior of reserved, wife-material type wimmenfoke in small towns. The story kicks off around Christmastime as we experience her "unexciting middle class woman" existence before an automobile accident cracks her in the skull and unlocks her past life, in which she was apparently late eighties Sylvester Stallone with a vagina. So begins an action-packed romp where she abandons her daughter, leaving the adorable moppet with her live-in boyfriend/fiancee, and running off with a shady detective (fake-tough nigger Jackson) to uncover the full story of who she once was and eventually a secret plot that goes all the way up to and through the "bad" side of the CIA, because there is obviously a “good” side, or so I’ve been told. I never cease to wonder at how they manage to write women so poorly in these scenarios. Shane Black does well enough writing catchy dialogue (mostly, except when he wants to have tough-talking chicks). He could do a decent turn at churning out hard boiled film noir, but instead opts for a spy/crime thriller written for Bruce Willis, until he occasionally recalls that it would be a woman playing the part, and a mother, no less. At six feet tall, Geena Davis is an imposing figure of a woman (I will leave off the remarks from the transvestigation crowd), which means that she works cinematically in terms of holding her own with fight sequences, unlike the anemic waifs they usually throw at us nowadays (cough cough Prey cough cough). That said, what makes the early sequences in the film so jarring and eye-popping are that she's the mild-mannered schoolteacher mommy doing the violence. When her memories come back and her "real personality" takes over, turning her into generic male action star, but one with a decent rack, the character becomes far less interesting. Even her "real" name is "Charly," delving further into the "masculine character masquerading as a woman” concept. What would have been infinitely more engaging would have been to see "Samantha," the happy traditional woman, trying to reconcile her old life to her new one, attempting to keep the old life a secret because she loves her daughter and embraces the femininity the agency life denied her, all while the CIA spooks attempt first to drag her back into the old life, and eventually threaten her family to get her to comply. Few things in the wild are more deadly than a mother bear when her cub is threatened. Black uses some of that “protective mother” theme, but he also features an entire section in the middle wherein she readopts her old persona, cutting her hair short, peroxiding it, donning heroin chic makeup, smoking, swearing, drinking, pissing standing up (not really, but may as well), and offering to suck nigger cock to spite the cuck boyfriend she left her daughter with - the least realistic part of the film being when Muhdickson turns her down, because nogs have no actual sense of self control when it comes to sex... or drugs... or violence... or anything, really. Don't get me wrong, "Charly" is basically the average western woman in the twenty first century - minus the marketable skills and plus about 20 bmi, so it isn't that her attitude isn't "realistic," but it is boring. If I want to see tough talking women with substance abuse problems, mental health issues, bad haircuts, shitty dye jobs, poorly applied makeup, and zero hangups about abandoning their children, I could merely download the TikTok app. Instead of Ripley from Aliens, who is compelling, we get a substandard female ripoff of a tough guy, who isn't. Ultimately, of course, in true third wave fashion, it isn't "Samantha" the loving mother who saves her daughter, but the masculine "Charly.” With the subtlety of a windshield to the head, the film shows the women in the audience that they can have their “badass careers,” terrible personalities, poor habits, and lack of female decorum while still getting to eventually be mothers and have their own cute, doting, submissive husbands who'll love and raise the daughters they acquired during their cock carousel phases, leaving them free to go out adventuring – which for them is less John Wick and more Johnnie Walker. To that end, the movie was ahead of its time.