Ali
Action movie staple Renny Harlin, now living and working in China, tells The Hollywood Reporter that he’d still like to do a sequel to his big ‘90s hit “The Long Kiss Goodnight” – for which he’s even written a treatment.
According to Harlin, whose new film “Bodies at Rest” premiered at the Hong Kong Film Festival this week, the sequel would bring back Samuel L.Jackson’s Mitch Henessey and team him with a new, younger actress, who’d play Samantha Caine’s daughter (Harlin’s ex-wife Geena Davis played Caine in the original film).
“Several people, producers and financiers, here in China, have talked to me about doing either a Chinese remake or doing an English language sequel and yeah I’ve played with the idea.
“I’ve created a treatment for [a sequel] where basically in a nutshell the story is that in the opening sequence Geena’s character is murdered. And her daughter, who now would be in her early 20s, who was five or six years old in the original, she would be now in her 20s. And she’s in university. After her mother dies, she receives this mysterious package. And there’s something in it that she doesn’t really understand And now all the government and a couple of bad guys are after her because they have a hunch that the mother sent the item to her. So now she’s on the run. She has no-one to turn to, she’s so over her head. The only person that she knows that could maybe help is Sam Jackson’s character. And then it becomes basically a road movie. But now it’s Sam and Geena’s daughter on the road. That’s my treatment.”
While it’s looking good, Harlin suggests it might be a while before we see the film.
“I talked a little bit about it to Toby Emmerich at Warner Brothers. And it’s just you know, the studio machinery is so cumbersome. My feeling is that it’s one of those situations where they can’t decide whether they would just give me, or sell me the rights, and let me make the movie. Or if they want to be actually actively involved. At the moment they would want to be actively involved. Then it’s marketing and distribution and international and a million other things that have to be taken into account — so it gets really slow and complicated.”
Harlin says Jackson is 100% committed to the project.
