Val Kilmer Channels Pistachio Disguisey in the Proudly Preposterous 1997 Vehicle The Saint
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Val Kilmer turned down appearing in a sequel to Batman Forever, the top-grossing film of 1995, to star in 1997’s The Saint. That might have seemed like a questionable decision at the time, but it turned out to be wise.
Though a final success designed to be the first in a series of globe-traveling adventures produced by star Kilmer, The Saint nevertheless never generated a sequel, though in the past decade or so, reboots have been announced that similarly never got made.
A sequel to Batman Forever seemed like a no-brainer. Unfortunately, “no-brainer” also describes the film’s screenplay and overall tone. Batman & Robin got just a little too silly. It might have gone a little overboard with cold-themed wordplay.
Instead of wasting his talent top-lining a campy, over-the-top Batman sequel that delighted in its absurdity, Kilmer ended up starring in a campy, over-the-top adaptation of Leslie Charteris’ novels and short stories about Simon Templar, a righteous master thief who steals from the ungodly rich and gives to the righteous poor.
The Saint has enjoyed a robust life as novels, short stories, a stage play, a television show, television movies, a radio series, and a comic strip. The dashing and dapper George Sanders played the role in a series of films, but the part will always be associated with Roger Moore, who played the character in a hit television show before getting cast as James Bond. Vincent Price voiced Simon Templar/The Saint on the radio.
The Saint captured Kilmer at the height of his popularity. The Juliard graduate was a classically trained dramatic actor, but when he made 1997’s The Saint, he was a movie star rather than a thespian.
Kilmer was red-hot thanks to Tombstone, Batman Forever, and Heat, the last of which found him playing the third lead after Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. This might be hard to believe, but Pacino and De Niro were once synonymous with quality and ambition, not mercenary desperation.
Kilmer channels his Island of Dr. Moreau costar Marlon Brando at his biggest as a super thief who galivants about the globe wearing ostentaciously fake-looking mustaches and beards while showcasing a wide variety of accents, each less convincing than the last.
The Saint opens unnecessarily with a prologue chronicling the antihero’s hardscrabble youth in a grim Catholic orphanage, where he picks up a gift for larceny and a knowledge of saints that figures prominently in the proceedings.
We then jump ahead to the present. Simon has leveled up to become possibly the greatest and flashiest thief the world has ever known.
The chameleon dons a mustache and sports a dodgy Russian accent when stealing a microchip from Ivan Tretiak (Rade Šerbedžija), a power-mad billionaire oligarch who suggests a cross between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
Like Putin, Tretiak is a nationalist who dreams of restoring Russia to its former glory, through military force if necessary. Like Trump, he’s a crazed billionaire who nakedly aspires to become the most powerful person in the history of the world.
Like Pistachio Disguisey in Master of Disguise, Simon subscribes to the counterintuitive notion that the best way to travel the world unnoticed and undetected is to wear a series of clearly fake disguises while behaving as ostentaciously as possible.
Also, like Pistachio Disguisey, Simon does not disappear into different characters, accents, and characters. Instead, he practically begs for attention by making a spectacle of himself at all times.
Simon is all about continuity and consistency, so the common denominator of his alter-egos is that they’re all named after saints.
Ivan Tretiak offers to pay the title character millions to steal the formula for cold fusion, a potential game-changer for humanity and the film’s slippery villain specifically.
This leads him to Dr. Emma Russell (Elisabeth Shue), a Nobel Prize-level electrochemist who made one of human history's most impressive and important inventions.
Shue doesn’t enter the equation until nearly a half hour in. According to Wikipedia, the film initially had Shue die early in the third act, but test audiences were understandably confused as to why the female lead perished with a half hour left after being introduced late in the film.
Simon’s relationship with the impossibly brilliant scientist is the film’s flimsy emotional core, so it seems strange that in the initial cut, she only figured prominently in the film’s second act.
The love of Simon’s life being murdered in the prime of life would be a strong impetus for revenge, but The Saint is cotton candy fluff with no depth and no substance, so it would feel jarringly wrong to kill off the second-most-important character.
Shue plays Dr. Emma as the world’s most brilliant scientist and a uniquely gullible single woman.
Simon has a gift for turning himself into anybody he needs to be. Ascertaining that Emma is ready for love, he shapeshifts into swoon-worthy romantic Thomas More, a South African poet with long, luxurious Jim Morrison hair whose poetry Kilmer apparently wrote himself.
Emma might be literally the smartest woman in the world, but she’s stupid enough to fall for a prolific thief who is cosplaying as the cover model for a romance novel.
Astonishingly and improbably, these are all the same man!
Other idiotic disguises Kilmer adopts and then discards include a German dweeb with the world’s worst combover and gag teeth and various long-haired Casanova types.
The Saint is dumb fun in its first hour. It’s spectacularly silly stuff with a wonderfully hammy performance by Kilmer. It apparently cost 100 million dollars to make. In 1997, that was a lot of money. I suspect that’s because they had to make new sets constantly because Kilmer kept devouring the scenery.
In its more straightforward second half, it’s much less fun. The Russian mafia makes for a boring villain, and Kilmer seems unengaged when he’s not wearing a ridiculous disguise, rocking hair extensions, and butchering a heavy accent.
The Saint was a modest commercial success. It was supposed to launch a franchise, but that was not to be. Roger Moore was underwhelmed by Kilmer’s American version of the Saint.
Apparently, they met long after The Saint underwhelmed critics and audiences. Kilmer said that he realized how badly he’d missed the mark after reading some of the literature that inspired the film, TV show, radio program, comic strip, and pogs.
Kilmer was impressed by Leslie Charteris’s work. Good books had inspired a bad movie. The crazy thing about The Saint, however, is that it never even aspires to be good. It’s most entertaining when it luxuriates in its campy badness.
With a lesser actor in the lead, this would be a total miss. Kilmer’s palpable delight in abusing his extraordinary gifts, however, renders it exceedingly watchable, which is about the most you can hope for with a project this proudly preposterous.
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