Amnesiac Assassin: The Long Kiss Good Night v. The Bourne Identity

Two amnesiac assassins. One pose.  Only one can win.

There is a little-known, dimly-lit recess in the bowels of the CIA where they train super-powered, tougher-than-nails assassins to be ruthless, heartless, inventive, brutally efficient and impervious to pain.  There’s only one problem: if you drop one in cold water, he or she will invariably get amnesia.

That is the premise of both The Long Kiss Goodnight and The Bourne Identity.  One of these movies is a taut, thrilling masterpiece of its genre and the other is a silly, flip, extravagant eruption of action-movie weirdness.  I’ll let you figure out which is which.

The Bourne Identity opens moments after its protagonist’s amnesia-inducing drop in the water.  That’s important because it puts the audience in the same position as the protagonist.  We find out who the protagonist is at the exact same moment he does.  He is fished out of the water by some fishermen, recovers from his bullet wounds, takes the one clue he has to his identity and starts on his journey of discovery.  Wide-eyed and up for anything, he wanders into a world of international skullduggery and intrigue, innocent as Bambi but with the reflexes and stopping power of a ninja.

The premise is used brilliantly, and for all it’s worth.  Bourne is an amnesiac, but because he’s an assassin he’s able to think fast, kill like lightning and get out of any trap, regardless of the odds.  But because he’s an assassin, the people he doesn’t know he knows (including some other assassins from the same super-secret super-assassin program) want to kill him.  But because he’s an assassin, he’s able to take care of himself.  But because he’s got amnesia, he has no idea who these people are and why they want him dead.  But because he’s an assassin he has the resources to track down his antagonists.  But because he’s got amnesia he has to keep them alive long enough for them to tell him who he is.  And so the script keeps folding in on itself while the stakes keep rising.  It hurtles back and forth between amnesia and assassin; as soon as a problem is solved on the one hand, another is asserted from the other.  Bourne’s world keeps unfolding outward, getting more and more mysterious even as his identity comes into sharper and sharper focus.

Compare the efficiency and elegance of the first act of Bourne to that of the first act of The Long Kiss Goodnight.  The protagonist of Kiss (Geena Davis) is a housewife who was found on a beach eight years ago with amnesia.  Okay, good.  Then, shortly before Christmas, she runs her car into a deer, goes off the road and bumps her head.  Memories of her old life start coming back and she starts acting weird.  Okay, still good.

Now watch what happens.  Samuel L. Jackson (or God, depending on your point of view) is a cheap private detective whom Geena hired a while back to find out who she is.  While Geena finds her old self coming back, Sam coincidentally also finds out a clue to her identity.   Why?  Either one of these would have made a perfectly good inciting incident.  It could be that Geena hits her head, starts acting weird and hires Sam, who could then find out a clue to her identity, or it could be that she hired Sam a while back, he’s found something and the thing that he’s found starts to stir memories within her.  Why do both?

But wait, there’s more!  At the same time, a one-eyed man in prison sees Geena on TV!  It turns out he’s the guy who thought he’d killed her, and soon he busts out of prison, bent on revenge.  What?  Why do we need this guy?  Now we’ve got two coincidences piled up on top of our premise, when all we needed was Geena bumping her head.

But, unbelievably, the filmmakers give us yet one more!  Yes, Geena’s old co-workers, who all want her dead now, hear about the one-eyed guy getting out of prison and realize they have to go kill Geena.  That’s four inciting incidents, three of them coincidental; it seems like everyone in the world, including the deer, is intent on Geena Davis snapping out of it.

Screenwriter (and now director) Shane Black has a knack for reflexive irony and standing cliches on their heads; you can see all of that to fine display in his delightful Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.  One has to wonder if he means the overly-helpful plot of Kiss to be funny, for Kiss to be a actually be a sex-inverted send-up of Bourne (which was a novel, and in fact another movie, long before Kiss was made).  Kiss certainly is not meant to be taken seriously; this is a movie where 20th-century ruthless assassins torture a woman with a water wheel.

In Bourne, everyone, assassins, buereaucrats and innocents alike, keep their heads down and move with precise accuracy.  In short, they perform the actions they need to in order to attain their desired objectives, and nothing else.  In Kiss, characters announce who they are, what they do and what they stand for, as in “Hi, I’m Todd, I’m a grumpy middle-aged screenwriter, I like to listen to ragtime, and the real thing too, not that Marvin Hamlisch adaptation shit, and I like to watch espionage thrillers, my wife says I laugh in my sleep, you got a problem with that?”  Strange behavior for folks in the espionage trade.  They also constantly give themselves away, stage deadly shootouts and car chases in public places and keep blowing shit up long after doing so would do them any good.

Geena Davis v. Matt Damon: both are good actors, but in the key scenes where the ordinary person is revealed to secretly be a super-skilled assassin, Matt mops up Geena without breaking a sweat.  Geena looks like she can barely lift the super-rifle she carries with her and she holds it as though it’s a puppy she’s worried might pee on her.  Both have sex appeal, but my wife only wants to leave me for one of them (actually, let me amend that: my wife assures me that she wants to leave me not for Matt Damon but for Jason Bourne, which is a load off my mind).

Sam Jackson v. Franka Potente (as the Innocent Partners): a much tougher choice.  Two utterly different actors, but Franka is used better in Bourne.  We never really quite buy Sam in Kiss, we know he’s smarter, tougher and more resourceful than he appears to be here.  Watching him play second-fiddle to Geena, pretending to be silly, clumsy and stupid (not to mention victimized), is sometimes painful.  I very much like the idea of Geena Davis being tough and saving the day, but why cast Sam Jackson if you’re just going to tie one arm behind his back just to make your star look better?

Brian Cox appears in both films, in essentially the same role, the head of the super-secret super-assassin program.  He’s gotten a promotion in Bourne, even though he gets killed in Kiss.  Funny thing is, in spite of utterly screwing up the super-secret super-assassin program in both movies, he does the exact same job for the Canadians in X2!  Now that’s what I call patronage — talk about failing upward.  (a second, more horrifying possibility occurs to me — Brian Cox is a mole, working for the other side, intentionally screwing up our super-secret super-assassin programs!)

Now take a look at the action in both movies.  Kiss features gunfights, jumps from tall places, people outrunning orange fireballs (the epitome of 90s action cliches), flying cars, exploding trucks, exploding buildings.  All of it is cartoonish and silly; none of it hurts.  Nor is it meant to: it would spoil the fun if we got too worried about the protagonists (or thought too much about the logic of the narrative).  Deep wounds wash off a scene later and there is no injury that a character cannot spring back from.  In Bourne the action is smaller, swifter and grittier, but we feel every punch, every stab wound, every crunch of fender against fender.  Bourne telescopes inward, getting more and more intensely focused as its protagonist closes in on his objective, while Kiss soars blissfully out of the realm of believability and into a weird kind of hyper-violent ironic pop-pomo paradise.

The thing that happened in between movies, of course, was 9/11.  Which, strangely enough, Kiss references.  (Spoiler Alert!)  As Kiss imagines the world of espionage, the CIA tried to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993 in order to get the federal government to increase its funding.  When that didn’t work, they set what would become the plot of Kiss into motion.  This, of course, is nonsense, as everyone knows the World Trade Center was destroyed by the Jews.