Val Kilmer finds his perfect alter ego in 'The Saint'

JAKARTA (JP): The grungy, long-haired man stares at the blonde girl with love-sick eyes. He obviously thinks he's Fabio, while the girl looks like Cheryl Ladd's ultra-perky Charlie's Angel. They radiate electrical currents as each tries to decipher the other.

Behind his cushy, inviting mouth lurks a nameless, homeless, international espionage expert who is a master of disguise, accents, burglary and psychology. Especially female psychology. He knows everything about the girl -- that she is a genius, that she adores her bohemian scientist father, that she is lonely, gullible and inexperienced with men.

Behind her wide-eyed, giggly, teenybopper presence indeed lurks a genius. For Dr. Emma Russell (a grossly miscast Elisabeth Shue) has founded a Cold Fusion formula which could create a cheap and renewable energy source. Simon Templar alias The Saint (Val Kilmer), is seducing her at the behest of Ivan Tretiak (veteran Croatian actor Rade Serbedzija), a Russian industrialist powermonger. To Tretiak, the formula means reheating oil-depleted Moscow and bolstering his presidential hopes. To Templar, it means a US$50 million bank account and early retirement.

Yet, when Russell tells him that he is "not what he seems" and that he is "running from the pain of the past", he instantly turns mushy. His past, you see, is indeed painful. As a small boy growing up in a cruel Far Eastern orphanage, he is forced to adopt a Catholic saint's name he is meant to emulate. Defiantly, he calls himself Simon Templar (a comic-book pseudo-magician character) and vows to make it in this world and never look back.

Worse, the rogue adventurer has been hit where it hurts most - his ego. He should never surrender his heart. He is in strictly male territory where chauvinism is an inviolable code and emotions are for the weak.

But, hey, this is the 1990s. Even if James Bond is too proud to surrender his philandering ways, and Ethan Hunt is too busy chasing ambiguous, post Cold-War enemies around the globe to have any discernible relationship, the Saint wants to be different.

He confines the action locale to two places: Oxford, England and glorious Moscow, right in the heart of the Kremlin. He defines the enemy of megalomaniac who wants to restore the Soviet Union to its former glory - the New World Order's prototypical, foreign bad guy. He pays necessary homage to cyber-slicksterdom, although he doesn't hang from ceilings downloading info. He is chock-filled with "personality". He even has a cool, throbbing, techno soundtrack up his sleeves, assuring a steady action pace and putting Lalo Schrifin's Mission Impossible title song to shame.

What's more, he falls in love. He says "I love you". He never loses his patience even if she purrs "What is your name?" in nearly every scene. He fights Tretiak and his son Ilya (Russia's Valery Nikolaev, who is leaner, meaner, and better in one-on-one battle than himself). He even kisses his retirement money goodbye and helps his lady love donate it to humankind. And, although the real objective of the film is to show "How the Sinner becomes a Saint", you don't really get to see it. You only see a man in love, both with the girl and with himself.

High-tech thuggery

Heeding the box-office success of Mission: Impossible, Paramount has thrown its entire weight behind the $60 million The Saint, the latest potential mega-franchise to join the long, profitable industry of post-Cold War, high-tech thuggery.

Apart from the 1960s British TV series of the same name starring Roger Moore, the hero of Leslie Charteris' novels remains largely unknown to today's moviegoers. Yet producer Mace Neufeld, who together with director Phillip Noyce transported Harrison Ford to ever loftier heights in the classy Jack Ryan saga Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, decided to change that.

Having again secured Phillip Noyce as The Saint's director, he told Premiere magazine, "I always look for franchises. If the film is a big enough hit, the actor arrives with it."

Small wonder that Val Kilmer gladly relinquished his skintight Batsuit to George Clooney, for in The Saint he has more room for improvisations.

Kilmer personified

If there is any movie in recent history whose publicity has been outshone by the personality hype surrounding its star, it must be The Saint. The paparazzi's dogged chronicling of Val Kilmer's every single move is as obsessive as it gets in a place where the machinery of gossip rules all.

Kilmer is handsome. Extremely handsome, in fact. But in a movieland littered with delicious-looking men, he has an edge. He is Mr. Duality. On the one end, he's hard-driving, witty, fun, professional - a perfectionist. On the other end, he's moody, high-strung, childish, self-absorbed, difficult - in short, the ultimate enfant terrible.

Yet, Val Kilmer can literally make or break a movie. He tampers with everything and throws tantrums unless he's 100 percent involved (hence the massive debacle of The Island of Dr. Moreau). In The Saint, he even imposes his own little script on the official screenplay by Jonathan Hensleigh, Wesley Strick and Rustam Ibragimbekov.

That Kilmer's duality has filtered through this eccentric, post-modernist hero is thus hardly surprising. But there's no denying that Simon Templar is a rather appealing character. He is a mercenary, a polymath, a con-man, a charmer, a boy-at-heart, and a rather lame action hero who nevertheless dazzles audiences with his mock self-indulgence and perfect comic timing.

If James Bond's steam comes from his iron self-confidence, the Saint's edge is his "humanity". Oh, yes. If you notice, he does not kill. And the quasi-English accent repertoire also passes muster -- only just.

While some of the 11 disguises Templar dons throughout the movie are plain pastiche, others are winningly entertaining, with the geeky reporter fetching hysterical laughs and the near- perfect imitation of Tretiak drawing gasps from the audience. They all look like Kilmer, but in this case, who cares?

Put it this way, Pierce Brosnan shouldn't play the Saint, and Val Kilmer shouldn't play James Bond. Which probably means that a sequel is already in the works, at least in Mace Neufeld's dollar-filled mind.