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

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.