The action film genre used to mean something. In the hands of master directors such as Sam Penkinpah (The Wild Bunch) and Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now) violence was a tool for unlocking and inspecting the human condition: humankind, stressed to it s limits, reveals a bit of its dark undersoul. Then in the 80's, with the emergence of the megastars such as Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Mel Gibson, the action genre began to devolveªthe stunts got bigger and sillier, the bitter musings became sarcastic one-liners, and the plots vanished in favor of filler wrapped around stunts. Epitomized by the vastly underrated and misunderstood Last Action Hero, this violence-as-comedy school of film has been one of the most profitable and popular in decades.

Then with the emergence of the cult of Tarantino/Reservoir Dogs), something odd happened: the cartoon-violence film began to take itself seriously again. This seems to have been a mistake. The Long Kiss Goodnight is a perfect example of a bastard child bo rn of comedy and violence. Loaded with the latest special effects and big names, yet appallingly violent; cheap in theatrics yet full of surprisingly funny and sharp dialog, Kiss is a schizophrenic film that can't decide whether to entertain or horrify th e viewer.

From a plot loosely scraped together from bits of La Femme Nikita and various CIA conspiracy theories, we get Geena Davis as Samantha Caine, a small-town teacher living a plush, comfortable existence. Suffering from a severe form of amnesia, she can't rem ember anything that happened before she awoke on a beach eight years ago.

Add to this Samuel Jackson as Mitch Henessey, a battered down-and-out private dick who resorts to pulling con jobs to pay the bills. He's hired to find out Samantha's true identity and manages to stumble on a clue from her past.

Somewhat conveniently, Samantha is involved in a deadly car accident that manages to giver her quite a blow on the headªjust the sort of thing to knock some sense into an amnesiac. After being attacked by a strange one-eyed homicidal maniac (and dispatchi ng him with more skill and brutality than the average schoolteacher might possess) Caine gets a few clues of her own about some of her hidden past, and the plot grinds into motion. Director Renny Harlin (Davis' husband) actually managed to handle the scho olteacher-to-brutal-CIA-hitperson transformation relatively wellªat least I didn't laugh out loud. Chalk that up to Geena Davis, an excellent actress who threw herself into the role with amazing gusto. As Geena has said again and again during her talk-sho w movie plugs, she did most of her own stunts, including jumping 60 feet into an ice-covered lake full of sub-zero water. Three times.

As the violence and mayhem in the film began to exponentially increase, I started to see a pattern emerging: death and destruction followed by periods of character development. No, I'm not joking. There are enough wet-eyed personal bonding moments in this film to stock an after-school special. Samantha bonds with her daughter, her boyfriend, Detective Henessey, and her guns in many crisply-written and thankfully short interludes between explosions.

Kiss also has elements of the "buddy picture," another staple of the cartoon-violence genre as typified by the Lethal Weapon series. Any fan of Thelma and Louise might experience some deja-vu as Samantha (beginning to transform into the cold-blooded kille r Charly Baltimore) argues and trades insults with Henessey during their road trip, while both of them are gaining "respect" and "admiration" for each other all the time.

This is actually the part of the film where both the writing and the actors shine. Samuel Jackson plays a great Henessey, as a man convinced that he can do nothing right and yet full of a hero complex big enough to shame Superman. The two have great on-sc reen chemistry, and when the banter got thick and fast there were hints of Bogart-and-Bacall timing.

Strangely enough, while all this character development is handled so seriously by the script, the violence is casual and without repercussions. Early on in the film a bunch of Bad Guys try to take Samantha out before she discovers who she really is, and m anage to kill the entire noontime crowd at a train station while missing Samantha/Charly completely. Does the camera linger on the felled innocents, making us feel the impact of such wanton violence? No, it's too busy following Samantha and Mitch as they manage to outrun the fireball of a grenade explosionªcartoon violence at its best.

The violence just gets worse from there. In keeping with her CIA-assassin past, Charly doesn't just stick the knife in, she twists it. In a bit of cheap theatrics, Charly's daughter is captured and held hostage by the Bad Guys, thus giving Charly the moti vation to slaughter the lot of them.

In keeping with the action heroes of our day, both protagonists manage to suffer incredible amounts of punishment, yet keep twitching that trigger finger. The bad guys are truly badder than bad and also refuse to give up, at least until the stunt budget g ives out.

Some of the violence is truly shocking in its intensityªtorture, flaming corpses, and massive head wounds aboundªand yet other scenes are just silly with improbability. I found the scene where a man points a gun at an eight-year-old girl completely inexcu sable and sick, yet laughed out loud at the explosive finale.

In the end, it is tough to make out what sort of film this is. The dialog and acting is crisp enough to be another Thelma and Louise, yet the body count would make Rambo blush. The movie pivots from buddy-bonding to bullet-riddled bodies so fast I felt vi ctimized. This film won't satisfy fans of pure mayhem, or fans of sharply-written detective films. I'm not sure an action film that makes you care about the characters before it kills them off is a sign of progress but I'm willing to bet that films like K iss are here to stay. Damn that Tarantino.

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