“My life is very strange. I don’t do anything normal.” So speaks Simon Templar, also known as the Saint, very late in the movie of the same name. By this point, there’s no real need for him to spell it out. It’s clear much earlier that Simon Templar, the gentleman-thief character from a series of old pulp novels and later a 1960s TV series, is a strange dude; that The Saint, the big-budget 1997 feature film centered around an updated version of the character, is a strange movie; and that Val Kilmer, the man playing Simon, is a particularly strange movie star, not least because he wanted to do The Saint in the first place. This was the movie that Kilmer essentially chose over following up his biggest leading-man hit, Batman Forever, with another Batman movie; though that George Clooney-starring sequel Batman & Robin turned out to be a good one to avoid, The Saint (released a few months before that final entry in the ’90s Batman cycle) didn’t exactly boost Kilmer’s career. On the other hand, that The Saint was a minor hit in the spring of 1997 is a testament to Kilmer’s juice at the time, and with his sad passing this week at the age of 65, it’s worth revisiting this oddity on Paramount+.
Why Watch The Saint Tonight?
In its broad outlines, The Saint resembles Not Quite Bond movies, like The Thomas Crown Affair, a Pierce Brosnan remake of which would appear in 1999. Indeed, it was a pre-Bond Roger Moore who played Simon Templar on television, and it’s easy to see how that might have translated into a film series. Simon is a thief and a rogue, but not a killer; a master of disguise, he’s able to steal for hire and maintain both a hefty bank account and a low profile as he moves between high society and the criminal underworld. Basically, he’s doing espionage for fun and profit, rather than saving the world.
What makes the movie both unusual and a compelling vehicle for Kilmer is how eccentric Simon really is, beginning with his backstory – a grim number about cruelty inflicted at a Catholic orphanage, and his guilt over the accidental death of his childhood crush, a real whimsy-crusher of a button on the movie’s otherwise delightfully odd origin-story prologue. Maybe that’s just the psychology required for a character who seems to thrive on playing dress-up. Tere are many scenes where Simon appears to enjoy his disguises vastly more than his actual thievery, something that was apparently echoed by Kilmer himself – who had to be dissuaded from including even more, and more elaborate, disguises in the film. As-is, he dons and doffs a variety of wigs, false mustaches, glasses, and prosthetics to play a vaguely grotesque older man at a chemistry lecture; a long-haired tortured artist who comes across a bit like a parody of Kilmer’s Jim Morrison; a dismissive assistant to the Saint that everyone seems to know is actually not real; and a doppelganger of the movie’s Russian bad guy, among others. (Actually, most of Simon’s accents sound vaguely Russian.)
It’s the tortured artist who inexplicably attracts the attention of scientist Emma Russell (Elisabeth Shue), whose formula for cold fusion Simon has been hired to steal. Falling in love with Emma and realizing the nefarious plans his Russian oligarch contact has for cold fusion, he eventually decides to protect the formula, Emma, and Mother Russia from these machinations, though his plans often feel less like heroism and more like fussy, disguise-heavy geopolitical meddling.
This all may make The Saint sound suspiciously like a bad movie. But in the wake of Kilmer’s death, it’s a wonderfully weird tribute to his own eccentricities as an actor. There’s a meta dimension to Simon, who obviously relishes his role-playing but admits he isn’t really sure who he is as a person; even his seduction of Emma happens largely through an alternate persona. The various pop-culture figures he recalls – Bond, Batman, etc. – have far stronger identities, even if they may struggle with morality (Bond) or duality (Batman). Kilmer makes the Saint seem genuinely feckless, even (or especially) when he enjoys the elaborate trappings of his lifestyle.
The movie also has a refreshing ’90s dimension in that despite some chases and fights, it’s not really a full-on action movie. Director Phillip Noyce tends to make old-fashioned thrillers, not pyro-heavy action, and The Saint, in its quirky way, follows that pattern. (It nonetheless makes an odd follow-up to Noyce’s Clear and Present Danger.) Even at the movie’s most ridiculous moments, it’s endearing to know that Kilmer wanted to do it at all – that this was his idea of a slick movie-star play to follow up a career peak. Kilmer often seemed most comfortable on screen when he was able to sidestep the obligations of a leading man, and The Saint now plays like a feature-length exploration of that ambivalence.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.
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