Roby78 Reviews

The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)

Long Kiss Goodnight - Slept on 90's action classic

[8/10 · 30 March 2009]

I love this movie and watch it every couple of years on DVD. I think it's one of the most slept on action thrillers of the 90's.

Renny Harlin is a solid action director (Die Hard 2 & Deep Blue Sea)and you can recognise it was written by the excellent Shane Black.

I think it has one of the best roles ever played by Sam Jackson, he's amazing in this as a private eye but it does have it's downpoints.

1) It's a bit too long - they could have shaved off 15 minutes.

2) The lead bad guy was good but David Morse is more physically imposing and would've been better in that role. Craig Bierko (too much of a pretty boy to play a badass) should've played the guy she was meant to target.

3) It's not clear enough about her family - how many kids does she have? Is the guy she lives with her husband? The kid's dad? This isn't explained properly until halfway through the film.

4) The story has flaws - the bad guys did not even need to get involved with trying to kill her. They could have carried out their scheme anyway.

I rated this a 7/10 on IMDb, would have given it an 8 but I always struggle to watch it in one sitting. The action set pieces are cool and the dialogue is amazing. Some of the lines by Jackson are brilliant - "I'm always Frank and Earnest with women..."

Chiller (1995– )

An under-rated show

[7/10 · 18 June 2006]

This series was shown on ITV in the UK in 1997. I'd say it's a kinda cross between Tales of the Unexpected and The Twilight Zone but more supernatural - an anthology series.

There were 5 episodes each starring famous British actors and the production cost was pretty high as it was a prime time show on a Saturday night.

One episode was about a load of kids that were going missing and it turned out that a cult was sacrificing them, another was about a woman who was haunted by the ghost of a baby that she miscarried - this one starred Martin Clunes of Men Behaving Badly fame.

The director of some of these episodes (maybe all of them) later did the UK gangster movie called Circus which released by Columbia Tri-Star / Sony pictures.

I dunno what he's up to now but if you watch this series you'll see that it's a shame he didn't make more movies.

Striking Distance (1993)

Decent cop thriller... but not as good as The Last Boy Scout

[6/10 · 15 January 2006]

Although this film is not a classic, you'll love this if you enjoyed Bruce in The Last Boy Scout, Hudson Hawk or the Die Hard Movies as he basically plays the same character. A down on his luck cop who kicks ass as hard as he hits the bottle.

Bruce stars as Tom Hardy, a Pittsburgh city cop who gets busted down to working on a police pursuit boat as he testified against his partner. His ex girlfriends keep getting murdered and dumped in the river - he knows that someone is doing this to frame him but who? This movie has an excellent car chase and some cool lines from Bruce plus some very good set piece action scenes. There are also some very good supporting performances from Tom Sizemore and a very crazy Robert Pastorelli.

I picked this up on DVD from ebay and was surprised by how good it looked on a large widescreen TV - I was only a kid when this was released so never saw it at the cinema. Good cinematography of the rushing river and the bridge. Definitely worth checking out.

"Who's the best cop now Jimmy??"