Continuing on with our series of Christmas picks, I’m including what could very well be Renny Harlin’s best work on the menu. It has many of the hallmarks of a true Christmas movie, including 2 Christmas parades and a Christmas party – but this story really could have taken place at any time of year. I think that writer Shane Black just has a thing for Christmastime (e.g. Lethal Weapon and Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang). Geena Davis is the star, and she’s great in this, but the supporting cast is definitely this film’s strong suit. Samuel Jackson provides one of my favourite performances as the lyrically remembering, Newport smoking private investigator Mitchell Henessey; and Brian Cox as the breathy, overacting CIA handler Nathan Waldman.
When we first meet our hero Samantha Caine, she has no memory of her life beyond 8 years ago. She works as a schoolteacher, has a daughter and a nice boyfriend, and has all but given up on learning anything about her past life. But when she bumps her head in a car accident on her way home from a Christmas party, things start bubbling to the surface, scary things. As the story unfolds, Samantha learns that she is really a spy named Charlie Baltimore. She also learns that she’s got a lot of skeletons in her closet, and those skeletons are after her. It’s a wicked buddy-action-comedy, and it has all kinds of great Sam Jackson moments, which is all anyone’s ever really looking for after all.
This film’s legacy would have to be it’s attempt to play the duality of female roles in movies against themselves as the thoroughly domesticated and maternal Samantha Caine struggles to resolve her other identity as the violent and sexualized Charlie Baltimore. While the two personalities spend the middle part of the film dueling it out with each other, it’s not until there’s some form of compromise made between the two (a composite of the two if you will) that she can overcome her enemies. Charlie Baltimore left such an impression with me (come on, blazing across a lake on ice skates with a silenced handgun in her hand and a sniper rifle on her back) that I named my daughter after her – just don’t tell my wife that.
