Though some of the violence is nastier than it needs to be and the obligatory climactic melee, complete with choppers, skidding trucks and explosions, overstays its welcome, The Long Kiss Goodnight stays fun because it plays its heroine's split personality for laughs, not trauma.

Writer Shane Black mines his thriller premise while musing on issues of identity and redemption; he also shaped the itchy camaraderie of Davis and Jackson.

Most of the fun comes from the Davis/Jackson pairing and some frantic action scenes, though problems include too many "meanigful" close-ups of cigarettes being lit and booming (appropriately) sound.

Geena Davis and her director and husband, Renny Harlin, recover from their "Cutthroat Island" fiasco in grand style, and screenwriter Shane Black ("The Last Boy Scout") juggles jolts and jokes with a mad fervor that almost earns him his $4 million salary.

With the help of his stunt and special effects teams, Harlin delivers more than enough goods to satisfy genre fans, so main question is whether a female action hero, and Davis in particular, is ready to be embraced by the huge public the film is clearly targeting.

The movie is a lot of fun if you don't think about it too much, the stuntwork should satisfy the genre fanatics in the crowd even though it doesn't set any new plateaus, and the rapport between Davis and Jackson is enough to keep the sticklers for realism in abeyance at least until the final credits roll.

I liked it in the same way I might like an arcade game: It holds your attention until you run out of quarters, and then you wander away without giving it another thought.

Great premise, terrible execution.

This is the kind of movie in which a dozen bad guys with an automatic weapon in each hand couldn't hit a lake if they were standing at the bottom of it, to steal the screenplay's best wiseacre remark.

A tour de force of technical brilliance, with flashes of humor and a wild spirit of adventure signifying that you're not supposed to take it too seriously, but the cumulative impact of its avalanche of mayhem is so numbing that it's enough to shrivel your soul.

Mr. Black's screenplay is mean-spirited, but it earns its keep with sharp, sarcastic dialogue and ingenious ways of setting up this story.

One of the most blithely, giddily ridiculous movies to come along in ages.

Ultimately, however, Kiss is too ridiculous to engage us as a thriller yet too cringingly self-conscious to amuse us as camp.

Unfortunately, the filmmaking couple take the fetishistic masquerade far too seriously. They may describe it as a "departure" from traditional fare, but it's simply the same old action-packed guff.