Last night, I watched The Long Kiss Goodnight. It’s a movie I haven’t seen for over a decade, and it is as good as, if not much better than I remembered. It’s a film that’s twenty years ahead of its time, and it’s well worth checking out if you haven’t seen it, or seen it for a while.
I don’t really do reviews, so this isn’t that. Instead, I want to talk about something I noticed. It’s a weird shared universe theory, but bear with me …
Brian Cox is in this movie about an assassin who has amnesia, and who is trying to piece together her history while dealing with the bad guys in the present. Brian Cox plays her handler, and the head of the secret Chapter program that turned her into a killer before she lost her memory.
That sounds familiar right?
Brian Cox is in the movie The Bourne Identity, about an assassin who has amnesia, and who is trying to piece together his history while dealing with the bad guys in the present. Brian Cox plays his handler, and the head of the secret Treadstone program that turned him into a killer before he lost his memory.
The Long Kiss Goodnight, let’s be clear, isn’t a rip-off of the Bourne books, rather a deconstruction of action movie tropes.
But let’s just pretend for a moment that Brian Cox is the same character in both movies. It’s not inconceivable that he would have different cover stories for different assets, and it’s not inconceivable that he would be heading up complimentary assassination programs.
The only stumbling block is that he dies in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Which is troublesome, because the Bourne movies are clearly set later in time than Kiss. Let’s not stretch the idea too far and pretend the movies are set in the time of the books, because they’re not. And as good as Brian Cox is, he can’t make himself appear in already published books.
Hmm.
What to do?
Well, let’s examine the movie X2, though I’d rather not. Brian Cox plays a character who wanted to make the ultimate assassin in a super-secret prograaaaaaam …. HANG ON.
The X Men movies prove that time travel is real.
Brian Cox made ALL THE ASSASSINS.
