Wonderland (2003)

Pardon the delay faithful readers, but I have returned to my Kilmer viewings and will continue to update the remaining entries in the Kilmer filmography with all due haste. I have a couple on the backlog that I need to get up right away so without further ado let me begin by asking:

How excited are you about the prospect of Val Kilmer playing a porn star? You'd imagine he'd bring that same raw-Jim Morrison in the Doors-sexual energy to the role, right? Now, how about Val Kilmer playing a washed up porn star who's now really into drugs and may be at the center of a grizzly murder? Sounds great right? It is.

Wonderland tells the story of a grizzly quadruple murder that took place in Laurel Canyon, a neighborhood type district in the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area (my new home). Back in 1981 this murder went down and a lot of evidence suggested that former porn star John Holmes was involved.
Good god. Look at that man. It's almost enough to make me grow out a mustache... almost. When the well endowed subject of Wonderland was actually making his films, the legal status of pornography was kind of unclear and accordingly, Mr. Holmes did what any rational porn star and drug addict would do to avoid getting in trouble: he became a police informant for the LAPD.

The movie focuses on a couple of eventful weeks when John Holmes ripped off some drug dealers living on the eponymous Wonderland Drive in Laurel Canyon. Kilmer plays Holmes as a totally sleazy and desperate cokehead and liar who betrays absolutely everyone at some point in the course of events. The murders and the subsequent investigation is told in a kind of interesting noir-ish nonlinear manner. It's a pretty enjoyable crime drama and Val Kilmer plays a man in a deep professional downward spiral (meta!).

Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Full disclosure: I'm a Bob Dylan fan. I don't just mean I appreciate his 1960s topical folk songs. I like his recent stuff a great deal. Everything from Time Out of Mind onward anyway. I like his life story and the bizarre turns his career has taken over the years. I've read his memoirs. His songwriting is usually phenomenal and his artistic vision is generally unique and forward-looking. Still, everybody makes mistakes.

"Masked and Anonymous" is set in a dystopian future where a corrupt concert promoter (John Goodman) has decided to put on a benefit concert of sorts to, somehow, heal the nation's psyche. Due to John Goodman's corruption, the only artist that they talk into playing is Jack Fate (Bob Dylan) a late Bob Dylanesque figure whose fortunes are in serious decline as he has to be sprung from jail to play the concert. The main problem with the movie is that the pacing is so slow that the story, told in this paragraph, drags out over the course of a full length movie. There are a couple of performances mixed in. It kind of makes the whole thing seem like a long, strange, conceptual Bob Dylan music video.

Val Kilmer appears only briefly in the film. He's listed as an "animal handler" in the credits, but he actually plays more of an exotic animal bbq concessions stand attendant who delivers a long rambling speech that more or less sums up everything wrong with this movie. Take a look.

Run for the Money (2002) aka Hard Cash

Val Kilmer plays a corrupt FBI agent in this slapdash Christian Slater-led crime caper. The plot is pretty outlandish. Christian Slater's character is a member of a gang of thieves who ends up taking the fall for a robbery gone bad. When he gets out of jail, he goes home to his love interest's trailer. She's been raising his daughter while he's in the slammer. While he promises his lil' sweet pea that he's going to lead an honest life from now on, the love interest is pressing him to make a couple big robberies so they can run away somewhere and start fresh. Side note, isn't it striking how many crime movies involve characters planning to run away somewhere and live fabulously wealthy new lives?

So things are going good for Christian Slater until he crosses Val Kilmer (and his partner)! As a psychotic and corrupt FBI agent, who is apparently not answerable to any sort of direct supervisor, Kilmer had been plotting out robbing the same off track betting parlor that Slater's gang takes out. It leads to a bunch of "haven't we seen this before" sort of action movie gimmicks with the corrupt cops kidnapping the daughter, a bunch of people dying, and a boat blowing up.

The strangest thing about this movie is that it seems to have mostly been meant for international markets. There's about three different working titles for it and a bunch of information about the international release dates on the imdb page.

The Salton Sea (2002)

Val Kilmer seems to have taken about a year and a half off of movie making. Presumably, he spent that time traveling back from Mars. In his next feature, a skillfully presented film noir, he plays a mohawked speed freak named Danny Boyle. I'm not going to do a spoiler alert for this movie because it's actually really good and I would recommend seeing it. Suffice to say that Kilmer's character wasn't born looking like this:
He had an awful experience on a trip with his young wife to the Salton Sea. See, he used to be a jazz musician. A whiteboy trumpet player of some talent. Then fate handed him a shitty hand and he's been sulking about it and taking a bunch of meth ever since. He's also narcing on dealers to a couple of rough cops. Looks like he's in a pretty bad downward spiral of self destruction... or is he? This movie does a pretty a good job of handling some modern takes of the film noir style. Yes it opens near what you will eventually see to be just about the end, but he's more of the detective as a drug addict than the detectives he's working with. It's a good turn in what has otherwise been a string of missed chances for our boy Val.

Red Planet (2000)

Here's the thing about "Red Planet:" once you get over the fact that it's an impossibly absurd and insane premise, even by sci-fi standards, it's not that bad of a movie. Like all good sci-fi, the lesson is not really about the future, it's about the present. Specifically, it's a pleas for environmental sustainability. In "Red Planet," the Earth of the future has been overpopulated and polluted to the point that the human race is in danger of wiping itself out. So, since the entire world had known about this for quite a while but never bothered to actually institute any social policies that could save the planet, it was decided by the world's governments (ha! the UN?) to start blasting big clumps of algae at Mars in the hopes that it would turn into an atmosphere capable of supporting life. The small cast of "Red Planet" is some specialty crew sent on a mission to make sure everything's in good blooming order up there.

There are eight crew members, led by the hardass captain, Trinity err... Carrie Ann Moss? Our hero, Val Kilmer, plays Gallagher, not the one you're thinking of though:He's basically the ship's mechanic. Like all strong women commanding officers in sci-fi, Carrie Ann Moss sleeps with Kilmer's character with little prompting. When an inconvenient solar flare fucks up the mothership, everybody but Trinity bails in their little launch ship to go down to the hopefully now partially habitable Mars surface. Trinity manages not to die, but just about everyone else will (spoiler alert). So the old philosopher with no real purpose on the space mission gets fucked up in the landing and croaks soon after. Everyone else is freaking out because they've got to get to this distant base but they're running out of air. Also, all that algae that was supposed to be making a new atmosphere is missing. Stuck on Mars with little hope of breathing for long. That's trouble. For some unexplained reason, two of the crew members hate each other and one of them pushes the other, I forget which, off a cliff. Now they get to the base, but whaaaa? It's all shredded. Like some big paranormal event came through and ripped it pieces. All the air's gone. All the food's gone. They're in some deep shit. Their air is no critically low and they start suffocating in their suits. Then, in the biggest leap of plot I've seen in a long time, Kilmer takes his mask off and he can breathe despite the lack of algae or other materials that might give them air.

Okay, stop to consider that. They can breathe but it's still a lifeless 'red planet.' So now they've got to figure out how to get back. They decide that they're going to use this old soviet rocket that's stuck there a couple miles away. They start making their way there and almost freeze to death at night. Some big storm rolls through. Also, Kilmer's pet robot goes berserk and is skillfully hunting and trying to kill them. It gets the bad guy. Ugh... There's so much to tell!

So we're down to two of the astronauts trying to get to the cosmonautical rocket. Kilmer and fate's enemy Tom Sizemore, when all of a sudden, we see the algae (hooray!) being devoured by a swarm of space roaches that obviously at their base and end up eating Tom Sizemore (booo!). This is a strange interpretation of Martians. They're like bugs that apparently love to eat everything that's not the inorganic surface of Mars. But they're flammable. Oh, and they somehow excrete oxygen which is why the cast can breathe without space suits. There's a showdown between the robot, Kilmer and the bugs. Kilmer blasts off. Earth is far from saved.

This actually was not that good of a movie now that I've written this all out.

Pollock (2000)

This well received biopic is about the famous 20th century American painter, Jackson Pollock. This being the internet and all, I'm not too sure how familiar you may be with famous modern painters, so for the uninitiated, Jackson Pollock caused quite a stir by making a lot of nice new modern art that consisted of dripping paint onto the canvas.He made a lot of them and for a time they were really popular. Then they were not that popular anymore because the art world is full of fickle pretentious assholes who always turn on a scene if it starts to get too cool, accessible, or successful for them. Anyway, Jackson Pollock drank himself right into a fatal car crash. Vrooooooooooom! Kilmer reprises his masterful Dutch accent that he picked up in "The Saint" to briefly appear onscreen as Willem de Kooning, another popular post-war abstract artist. De Kooning is known mostly for his weird depictions of women:
Oh yeah, he was pretty out there:
Kilmer's in this movie for like two minutes. Moving on.

Joe the King (1999)

I had never heard of this movie until I started The Kilmer Project. It was my hope that it would be a period piece about King Joseph I of Portugal, but alas, it is not. I'm still waiting, Hollywood! No, this is a story about a poor family in what, I'm judging from the accents, is supposed to be Long Island. The Joe they're talking about would be Val Kilmer's troubled and troublesome son. Kilmer plays Joe's hard drinking, deep in debt to fucking everyone, abusive janitor of a dad. The story is really about Joe and how a series of little crimes, like stealing food, spiral completely out of hand until this little preteen is pulling major heists.

He gets busted by Ethan Hawke, his guidance councelor who definitely did not deserve prominent billing in the credits since he had like two minutes of screentime. This extended trailer is a pretty complete retelling of the whole movie:



Anyway, the main thing to take away from this is that Val Kilmer gained a bunch of weight to play this role which was probably a mistake because even though he performs admirably in a difficult role, all that weight went to his gut and I don't think he's ever gotten rid of it.

At First Sight (1999)

Our hero finds himself walking the chick flick route in this absurdly premised piece of late 90s nonsense that's apparently based on a true story. Kilmer's character is just like every other adorable, softspoken, hockey playing, blind professional masseuse in a small upstate New York spa town, named Virgil. He smiles awkwardly throughout the whole movie. The story begins when he meets a nice new girl, who is a fancy uptight city dweller played by Mira Sorvino. She goes to the spa out in the country to take a break from her high pressure career as an architect or something. She gets a little crush on the massuese only to realize halfway through a conversation "Oh fuck! He's blind!" Kilmer's smiley Virgil goes home and brags to his seeing eye dog about the new girl he met (really). Very presumptuous on his part, but he's not wrong, she comes back to pursue this gentle, smiley fellow in earnest.

The course of the romance in "At First Sight" seems puritanically slow moving. They kiss and fool around a bit and she's inviting him to move in with her in the city. Then she discovers an ad for an optomologist who swears he can restore Virgil's shattered vision. Virgil throws a goddman passive aggressive hissy fit at this. His creepily overprotective sister let's Mira Sorvino know that he's gone through a bunch of procedures back in the day that all hurt really bad. Doctor Nathan Lane gets all lasik on his peepers and before you know it, he's restored. But he doesn't know what seeing is all about so he loses his shit! He starts freaking out bigtime and it's way overdramatically executed.

Oh, so the love interest's architecture firm consists of Kilmer's girl and her ex-husband. So, that's not awkward at all. Kilmer has a really hard time adjusting to the whole 'sighted culture' stuff but eventually he starts getting the hang of it. Mira Sorvino doesn't like him so much now that he's basically just another dude without a disability to make him seem idioscyncratic and exotic. Plus she gets really impatient with teaching him a bunch of seemingly obvious things that would be really hard for someone who had never seen anything before to comprehend. She's kind of a bitch. She starts straying and has a totally weird kiss with her ex. Tisk tisk.

So it's kind of a mixed bag for ol' Virgil. Sure he can see, but all he's really seeing is his relationship fall apart. Then things take a turn for the worse. In a twist right out of Flowers for Algernon, his vision starts to fall apart. (Spoiler alert): Pretty soon he's back to being really blind but still living in New York and helping out other blind folk. Eventually Mira Sorvino decides she loves him and wants to be with him again since he's back to being blind and exotic. She's presumably no less of a bitch but he agrees. True love conquers all.

Prince of Egypt (1998)

Val Kilmer plays a cartoon Moses. Yes, Moses. Also, God. There is of course a part in the biblical story of the Exodus where God talks to Moses. This is Kilmer talking to himself. The movie has a totally star studded cast for no good reason. Sandra Bullock? Really? For brevity's sake and to keep the blog moving I'm totally skimping on this entry. Whatever.

The Saint (1997)

Sorry for the delays in updating. Blogging is hard. To get pack on track I'm going to give some abbreviated posts for the past couple flicks.

The Saint is the story of an orphan kid who grew up in a really rough orphanage. The strict ass nuns force them to take the names of Catholic saints, so our future hero gets named Simon. His first girlfriend accidentally gets tossed off a balcony to her death while he was showing off his lockpicking skills. This obviously sours his experiences with Catholocism and maybe even morality when he grows up and turns into Val Kilmer. Dude turns criminal. Straight up master theft criminal. Straight up master of disguise criminal. Straight up vocal stylist criminal. You get the idea.

The story has quickly jumped to his adult years where he's ripping off the Russian mob. Read that sentence again. Yes, he's trying to be a cat-burglar to the most dangerous criminal organization around. Smart. So master thief Simon Templar (as in the Teutonic order!) blows this robbery.

There's a high stakes target he needs to rob from that the Russians are also after. It's Elizabeth Shue. She's developed cold fusion and apparently it's quite lucrative. She's got the formula written on notes that she keeps in her bra. Our hero, of course, gets her out of that with a bad costume as a professor of some sort that reminds her of her ex. Unfortunately, our professional thief makes the predictable mistake of falling in love with her.

Kilmer is downright terrible with some of these accents. I can't understand why they wouldn't spend a little extra on a decent speech coach.

The Russians are after them, they're in love, he's a master of disguise and a hugely successful con artist. This is how my parents met too. They get away, happy ever after the end. Boom!

Alright, blog. Just a couple more to go until I'm caught up!

The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)

Hey do you remember that one Val Kilmer movie... with the lions... in Africa? Yes. Yes I do.

The rambling thriller/period drama/horror/true story(?)/white-man's-burden colonial tale is set in Tsavo, Uganda during the height of the British Empire. Val Kilmer plays John Henry Patterson, a colonel in Imperial Britain's version of the Army Corp of Engineers. He's sent by an inexplicably mean boss to Uganda to oversee the construction of a railroad bridge. Once there, he finds out that the local (or imported from India) construction crews working on the bridge are totally freaked out about some lion attacks that have snatching people up in the night. He immediately kills a lion. Just, blap, one shot, down. I worried for a moment that I had completely misjudged what this movie was about and was going to have to settle in for a long construction journal.

But no. There's more than one lion terrorising this labor camp. In fact, there's two more. The Ghost and The Darkness. That's what the laborers are calling them. Anyway, these lions just start cold killing anything that looks like a man in the middle of the night. They sneak up when people are sleeping and drag them screaming off into the shrubbery to kill them for no purpose other than to momentarily satiate the lions' endless bloodlust. The workers are pissed and blame this ill fortune on the white demon that recently showed up named Val Kilmer. No matter what he tries, these lions just keep boldly attacking the workers. Daylight, nightime, sunshine, rain, snow (er... not so much snow, it being Africa and all). These lion attacks just get absurdly brazen though. I mean I know their lions but come on humans! Strength in numbers!


Then out of nowhere Michael Douglass roles through with a pack of Masaii warriors looking like he would never somehow convince Catherine Zeta Jones to get with him. He plays Remington, a former Confederate soldier who has a southern accent for about 10% of his lines (which is still somehow a better showing than whatever the fuck Kilmer was going for with his Anglo-Irish character's accent!). Anyway, the two white guys try to save the day by heroically hunting down these man killing beasts which cleverly outsmart their bullets until the war of attrition is finally one by our heroic Kilmer. Triumphing over nature by building the bridge over a river and triumphing over nature by putting bullets into a bunch of lions, the world is man's now.

The story is based on a true (though likely highly embellished) story and the real lions were donated to the Chicago Field museum in the 1930s. But um... Michael Douglass's weird ass character is totally invented just so things don't go too "Heart of Darkness." This movie is definitely worth watching if only for this one weird dream Kilmer has where his wife and baby son are singled out and attacked by a lion in a crowd of people.

Dead Girl* (1996) note

According to Kilmer's IMDB page, he played a supporting role in a 1996 movie called "Dead Girl" which was not released in the US and accordingly is not reviewed on this site. I'm trying to be thorough with this but I'm not going to kill myself trying to hunt down this comedy (apparently it's a comedy).

The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

Based on an H.G. Wells story, "The Island of Dr. Moreau" is generally not remembered fondly. In fact, my Netflix account thought that a viewer like me would give it a damning 1.7 star (out of 5.0) review. In truth, I enjoyed the movie immensely. It's dark and admiittedly kind of ridiculous, but it approaches some really interesting themes regarding bio-ethics and human nature.

The story begins with David Thewlis's (who is in Harry Potter but is not Snape!) character stranded in the ocean after having killed his two fellow survivors in a desperate act of self preservation. His raft is rescued by an Indonesian ship aboard which, for unknown reasons, Val Kilmer's character Montgomery is traveling. Kilmer persuades Thewlis to come visit the island where he works. Dr. Moreau (Marlon Brando at the height of his meltdown - overweight, barely audible, and strange strange strange) is the mad scientist who owns the island. It takes Thewlis's character all of one night to find out that there's really fucked up tests being performed which mix animal and human DNA with grotesque results. All manner of deformed freaky animal-human hybrids, or manimals if you will, are living a primative but separate life on the island... and strangely vegetarian? Some of these manimals are Brando's own "children" including the especially human looking Fairuza Balk (of American History X and Waterboy fame). Thewlis for some reason wants to run afoul of God's design by having some weird feelings of attraction for this feline human cross breed. The island's manimal population is kept in check by a high pitched buzzer that Brando's character has implanted in all of the manimals. For better or worse, "The Island of Dr. Moreau" gave the world the inspiration for the Austin Powers character mini-me by featuring a piano playing tiny version of Marlon Brando played by this guy:


Things quickly melt down when one of the manimals rips out his implant. There's kind of a manimal revolution and almost everyone dies. The end. Oh yeah, Val Kilmer says "when I die I want to go to dog heaven" and he does an actually pretty decent Marlon Brando impression which seems like a bit of overkill even a movie as over the top as this one.

If nothing else, "The Island of Dr. Moreau" served as a one-two punch with "Batman Forever" to knock Val Kilmer right out of Hollywood super-stardom. Although Kilmer has a huge filmography extending well beyond Dr. Moreau, he has never managed to regain the same starpower that he possessed in the mid 1990s. These two critical failures in a row coincided with Kilmer's divorce from Joanne Whaley (which he learned of from a news broadcast during the filming of Dr. Moreau!).

Heat (1995)

Michael Mann's 1995 cop and robber drama "Heat" tells the heartwarming story of a group of friends who had a dream. That dream was to pull off massive robberies.



I've always been kind of partial to Michael Mann's crime stories. Consider some of these titles: "Miami Vice," "The Insider," "Collateral," and upcoming John Dillinger movie "Public Enemies." He certainly tells a good cop and robber story where both the traditional good guy and bad guy characters are presented as being ethically compromised. "Heat" was the movie that really launched his career and that concept is definitely at play here.



One of the most exciting aspects of "Heat" was that for the first time ever, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino would be sharing the screen in the same movie. Granted, De Niro and Al Pacino were both in Godfather II, but because of the different stories being told set in different times they never were on screen at the same time. Also, don't make the common mistake of thinking that they were both in "Goodfellas," because that of course, is Joe Pesci, not Al Pacino that plays the loose cannon sidekick. So for the first time sharing a screen together are two Hollywood megastars made famous for their roles as gangsters. Take a look at the poster, you know there's going to be some high pressure acting going on between them right?:

Well... un pocito. Since Al Pacino plays a cop and Robert De Niro plays a bank robber, they only cross paths in two scenes. Even more frustrating for the viewer who is consciously aware of how exciting it is to have these two in the same movie, the director seems to have made a concerted effort to not have both of their faces in the same shot at any point during the movie. This leads to a disproportionate use of over the shoulder shots during the few scenes that their characters share. The scene in a diner is pretty cool though.

Val Kilmer plays De Niro's sidekick, a character named Chris Shiherlis. He's a family man with an unseemly long blond ponytail. He's also got some intense gambling debts which kind of force his hand into taking part in some increasingly brazen bank robberies even though the wifey is clearly sick of this life and trying to leave him. Even though he's one of four characters in the sort of inner circle of criminals, you can easily tell the De Niro likes him better than Tom Sizemore or that terrifying Mexican guy (whose so scary that the character is named after the actor!).

Batman Forever (1995)

Where to begin... If your average man on the street were asked to name one movie starring Val Kilmer, they would almost all say Batman Forever. He is universally remembered for his leading role as Batman. It is likely to be listed someday in his obiturary. Unfortunately, it is one of the absolute worst movies made in the 1990s.

I'm a little worried about how to approach this post because it's hard to explain the many places where this movie went wrong. There's no fatal coup d'grace here - this is a movie that dies a slow death from a thousand little cuts. I would like to think that Kilmer was unaware of the shitshow in which he was participating. I'd like to think that he was a serious actor who tried to bring a unique voice to a brooding and complex character. As anyone whose seen "The Dark Knight" can attest, when properly executed, Batman can be one of the most engaging characters of the superhero universe. According to no higher source than Kilmer's IMDB trivia page, he had a terrible working relationship with Joel Schumaker but enjoyed playing Batman. I think the conventional wisdom has it that Joel Schumaker is the man responsible for this godawful mess of a movie. He was given a chance for vindication but somehow made an even worse follow up with 1997's Batman and Robin. His IMDB page reads as a sad list of regretted wastes of time and uninviting avoidable flops. The end result of Batman Forever is a series of poorly thought out characters that don't really connect with each other and a story that just has so many weird implausible and obvious ommissions of rational thought that it's more puzzling than any of Jim Carrey's riddles.

I'll give you an example. Bruce Wayne is touring his factory when he spies the Bat-signal on the night sky (the lighting and full staff would suggest it's daytime). He quickly takes his leave of the factory tour (which, we're given the impression that he almost never visits this facility at all) and goes to his office which is apparently in this same unfrequented building. He goes to his desk and presses a button and a hole in the floor opens up that feeds him (in a sort of casket) through a tunnel at speeds of 200 miles per hour down to the batcave. Now, leave aside for a moment the fact that someone other than Bruce Wayne or Alfred would have to have built high speed slide by covertly creating a pipe that travels to the rurual Wayne Manor. Wouldn't the cleaning staff notice a big fucking trap door under this guy's desk?

Nicole Kidman plays a forensic psychologist who, when she's not busy acting totally slutty to both Bruce Wayne and Batman, offers inaccurate psychological insights into the mind of Two Face. Thankfully, I screened this film with a Psychology PhD candidate who was able to point out Kidman's many errors. For example, Kidman quite quickly diagnoses Two Face as having "Obsessive Disorder with homocidal features." Now maybe it's splitting hairs to point out that this doesn't exist, but if the script for Batman Forever was anything more than Joel Schumaker scribbling notes on a bar napkin, they could have called an actual psychologist to at least make an attempt at writing in something that's not totally made up. There's no shortage of actual psychologists in Los Angeles. Also, another unexplainable moment occurs when Bruce Wayne goes to visit her office in City Hall. He hears aggravated female grunts and hitting sounds. When he breaks down the door he finds her in the middle of a punching bag workout... in the middle of the day... in an enormous office at City Hall. What kind of psychologist is she that she has a punching bag in the middle of her office? It's not explained, it's just out there.

Perhaps the most blatant error of this movie is that with two supervillains, they decided to give them not one original voice. Instead, both Jim Carrey as The Riddler, and Tommy Lee Jones as Two Face, play cackling evil maniacs in the same way that Jack Nicholson played the Joker in the first of the modern series of Batman movies.

Compare this (about a minute and a half in):


With this:



It's a goddamn travesty. This ruined everyone who touched it for quite a while. Jim Carrey's never FULLY rebounded, Tommy Lee Jones had Men In Black but otherwise... tsk tsk, and Val Kilmer began a slow strange decent into his present trajectory. Only Michael Keaton has suffered a worse Batman curse.

Tombstone (1993)

Tombstone represents another major uptick in Kilmer's popular success. He plays the wild west legend and dentist known as Doc Holliday. While most of the actual facts of Doc Holiday's life have been accentuated by old West legend, it is established that he was a drunk, a gambler, suffered from consumption (that's tuberculosis for the uninitiated) and took part in a massive revenge killing spree initiated by the Earp family.



The movie Tombstone tells the tale of the former old West lawmen of the Earp family (Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan) settling down with their wives in Tombstone, Arizona. The Earps plan on striking it rich by basically extorting a healthy share of the profits out of a local casino by using their reputations for western machismo to provide protection. Doc Holiday (Kilmer) rides into town with his prostitute looking girlfriend and proceeds to be sweaty and pale all the time and say mildly rude things to the gang of toughs known as "The Cowboys." He's basically a fading Southern dandy. This forces Holiday's old friend Wyatt Earp to take his back and puts everyone into confrontation with The Cowboys... who are known for wearing fancy red sashes around their waste like some sort of gringo matadors. Seriously, Kilmer has never looked paler or sweatier:


I had originally seen Tombstone quite a while ago and seemed to remember it as a story of pure good guys (The Earps) faced against pure evil (the Cowboys). It's really a very morally gray movie. The Earps are siphoning off their money from an casino/bar that they just ran into and demanded a share of the profits. Their vigilantism, allbeit well intentioned, essentially sets of reciprical violence between the two groups. And when one of the Earps gets killed... oops... spoiler alert- the murder spree that they conduct is just brutal. They set about hunting down these Cowboys in what is basically a "The Most Dangerous Game" type killing spree. Can nothing satiate Kirk Russell's mad bloodlust?!

The leader of the Cowboys, Curly Bill, is played by Powers Boothe (stage name? probably), who went on to play Cy Tolliver in the awesome Deadwood series on HBO:



Tombstone was a mega-hit that capped off a glut of mid 90s wild west movies. This was a huge win for Kilmer who continued his string of vigilante heroes soon after this with his most memorable (and possibly worst) role... Batman. As memorably said by Doc Holiday, "I have not yet begun to defile myself."

True Romance (1993)

Let me apologize for my lengthy absence from the blogging scene. I've been out of the country on various adventures. I have now returned and am back on task with my Kilmer viewing mission. I have to say, however, that while I enjoyed "True Romance" a great deal, there is not much to report on the Kilmer front. In fact, Kilmer is probably in the movie for less than two and a half minutes.

"True Romance," for the uninitiated, was written by Quinton Tarentino and the dialogue is accordingly awesome. It begins with now faded actor Christian Slater chatting up some blond at a bar during the middle of the afternoon. He's going on and on about how amazing Elvis Presley is and ends up getting shot down by the girl when he tries to ask her out. Through some weird circumstances involving a friend setting him up with a call girl on his birthday and their subsequent declaration of mutual love, the story takes what almost looks like a cheesey twist. BUT, then Val Kilmer, as a faceless sequin jumpsuit wearing southerner who is strongly implied to be Elvis, makes an appearance as a hallucination only seen by Christian Slater that basically tells him to go kill the Alabama's former pimp. Things rapidly get crazier after that culminating in one of the strangest shootout scenes I've ever seen.

It's hard to analyze Kilmer's performance here. He keeps an accent and everything but you never see more of his face than his snarled lip. I guess it's a pretty good Elvis. Good enough for a hallucination anyway. Part of me thinks it would be pretty great to have Val Kilmer appear as Elvis in a hallucination where he tells me things to help me morally justify poor decisions.

What I found surprising about "True Romance" was the huge number of actors who are still considered big movie stars in 2009. Brad Pitt, Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Walken, James Gandolfini, and to a lesser extent Gary Oldman, Tom Sizemore (very much pre-meltdown), Dennis Hopper, Patricia Arquette and Michael Rapaport are all in this movie to some degree. Still, it's a sign of the draw that Val Kilmer had in 1993 that his EXTREMELY limited role in this received almost top billing in the credits.

The Real McCoy (1993)

I've decided to add a new category to The Kilmer Project's labels: Supporting Role. In this 1992 Kim Bassinger movie, our boy Val does not get a lot of screen time so pardon my lack of enthusiasm in this post.

Even though this movie was released in the mid-90s, everything about it has the look and feel of a 1980s crime drama starting with the neon Miami Vice-ish font that introduces the movie. The movie opens in the midst of an elaborate one man bank heist. Suddenly something goes wrong and the alarm is going off. The masked robber is trying to escape but gets caught. Flash forward a couple of years and this master thief is getting out of jail when we finally see his face... what?! It's not a man at all! This robber is a pretty lady!

So Kim Basinger (as Karen McCoy) gets out of the joint and has to try to make it on the outside. She bumps into Val Kilmer who is an incompetent thief but a big fan of her bank robbery work. Also, it's pretty obvious that he's got the hots for her. There's some drama with her not seeing her kid, a sinister criminal who kidnaps this kid in order to convince her to rob an incredibly secure bank, the impossibility of pulling this off, but maybe just maybe, and... you can see where this is going. It's not a very good movie.

The only thing I really want to comment on about this movie is that it's set in Atlanta but there's absolutely no reason it should be set in Atlanta. Atlanta's a sprawling, boring, and nondescript town. This story could be set anywhere, so why pick the one large city where these actors (none southerners) have to fake a southern accent?! They're terrible at it. Don't get me wrong, I'm no accent coach nor am I an expert on what people in Atlanta are supposed to sound like. But the cast is so inconsistent it's laughable. Kim Basinger can hardly finish a sentence without dropping her accent. The main bad guy is audibly British and doesn't really attempt to hide it. And Kilmer's weirdo "J.T. Barker" getaway driver character barely has enough lines for it to matter.

Keep movies out of Atlanta unless they have Outkast in them.

Thunderheart (1992)

"Thunderheart" finds Val Kilmer following his desert wandering Native American spirit in "The Doors" into a scarcely remembered early 1990s Indian reservation crime drama. In an exciting moment for any Washington, DC resident, the film begins by following Val Kilmer cruising around town in a red convertible. This trip takes him right past your author's office building and into the FBI headquarters where lazy failed presidential candidate, and moral dirtbag, Fred Thompson (my god those are fun to dig up!) gives our hero a new assignment. In a sadly plausible bit of identity politics shaping public policy, Fred Thompson decides that because agent Kilmer is like 1/4 Native American, he should be tasked with helping out in a cycle of violence taking place at the Sioux (Lakota presumably) Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

Kilmer jumps right into the action by helping his FBI-legend partner to track down a murder suspect. There's an unintentionally hilarious part of this chase scene where the FBI legend gets his hand gnawed by a strategically placed beaver. Kilmer plays "Ray Levoi" as an uptight asshole who's totally repressing his drunken Sioux father. Thanks to some interaction with a medicine man, Agent Levoi gets deep into his Sioux side. He has a hallucinatory "spirit walk" which plays a big role at the movie's climax. Surprisingly, Agent Levoi does not seem to be at all concerned about whether the sudden occurrence of waking hallucinations could possibly jeopardize his security clearance (which for those of us who have had them know is a totally burdensome process).

So anyway, tensions are running high between the Traditionalists who are trying to preserve their way of life and the government appointed tribal leader's goon squad. There's an inexplicable cameo by David Crosby as a bartender with one line (which has an incredibly incendiary racial slur). Seriously, there was no cause for that. Kilmer's character then starts showing the sort of outside the legal framework vigilantism for which he's most commonly known. He gets in some people's faces and uncovers a huge conspiracy. Then I think he loses his job. The End.

This movie was probably meant to soak up some of the shortly revived public fascination with Native Americans that was sweeping the country in the wake of 1990's "Dances With Wolves." Val Kilmer is partially Native American which probably played a big part in the decision to cast him for this role. Nonetheless, it's hard to find the idea of a fraction-blooded, city dwelling, career minded FBI agent being given even marginal credibility by the spiritual leadership of a tribe.

The Doors (1991)

Full Disclosure: I drank a bottle of wine before watching this and for this reason do not have many notes that are legible or relevant. Also, I've always kind of thought The Doors were an overrated band.

That said, being moderately blotto on wine may be the perfect condition for the viewing of this movie. This is the first movie The Kilmer Project has yet encountered where a convincing case could be made that Val Kilmer's claims to method acting are legitimate. He looks eerily like Jim Morrison and goes with the weird script and Oliver Stone's trippy directing so naturally. Plus all the druuuuuuuuuuugs:



This movie features Kilmer following a hallucinatory Native American which seems strangely fitting. This can briefly be seen near the end of the clip above where they 'ride the snake,' in hilariously copyright infringement circumventing German. This is a recurring theme at this point in Kilmer's career and could conceivaby be read as an attempt on Kilmer's part to connect to that portion of his genealogy.

I think I should take this time to point out, that as Jim Morrison is (probably erroneously) seen by some as a great American poet, that Val Kilmer himself is a bit of a poet. He wrote and self published a book of poetry in the 80's that is now incredibly rare (going for over $600). It has a poem about a young fling he had with Michelle Pfiefer entitled "The Pfiefer Howls at the Moon," (seriously!) and will be in my amazon.com wish list indefinitely.

But Jim Morrison, in my opinion is first and foremost a rock star, not a poet. Accordingly, "The Doors" follows the typical rock star biopic formula (starting with a purehearted love of music, finding unexpected stardom, success bringing new problems, drugs, cheating on spouses, gradual demise, brief chance of a turnaround, death) with some minor exceptions. For example, Jim Morrison is constantly on drugs and that doesn't seem to be his problem. Also, instead of putting Morrison up on a pedastal the Oliver Stone movie trys repeatedly to suggest that he was kind of scumbag who doubted his own profundity in his rare moments of sobriety. He has a weepy little pity party and exclaims "I'm a fake hero. This is a joke god played on me." I suppose your perspective on The Doors' music will determine whether or not you find Jim Morrison to be an insufferable, nihilistic, drug addled maniac or a reincarnated Dionysis whose music will echo throughout all recorded history. This scene definitely takes the middle ground.

Kilmer's definitely singing all the songs in the movie which is really pretty impressive. The movie is, however, so entirely tripped out that it takes some effort to get through it all. Like a bad trip it goes on too long and you kind of want it to end before it does. Oliver Stone's vision of the movie is pitch perfect with melting images and inexplicable hallucinations. This was a big win for Kilmer, the Lizard King.

On a personal note, and keeping with the themes of Dionysis (the god of wine also known as Bacchus), I just got back from New Orleans where I saw Val Kilmer in person as the King of the Krewe of Bacchus. I couldn't get a good photo in from where I was because it was dark and they were moving on by the time I got my focus about right, but take a look at him:So regal, so jolly. The question arose at the time, as a method actor does Val Kilmer believe that he is an actual monarch as he sits on the Mardi Gras parade float? Will he only answer to "your highness?" I'm leaning towards the answer to this being yes because Kid Rock was not dressed up like this on his float. Some of you out there may be wondering if I went to Mardi Gras only to see Val Kilmer. The fact is that I had the trip planned months before I knew he would be there. So no, I didn't go just to see Val Kilmer. That would have been weird.

Kill Me Again (1989)

We're approaching the end of the first decade of Kilmerness. He's gradually made the transition from a rock star, to a college whiz kid, to a sword wielding champion. He's achieved moderate fame primarily from his harsh but fair turn as Iceman in "Top Gun." Now he plays something a bit more classical. In 1989's film noir "Kill Me Again" Kilmer plays a Reno, NV detective who chases after his lovely female client (in this case played by his real life wife... at the time). I'd be lying if I didn't say that most of my notes relating to this film involve varying exclamations of what a stunner Joanne Whaley(-Kilmer) is in this movie. Seriously, what a babe:

A black leather jacketed Michael Madsen (pre-"Resevoir Dogs") plays a psychotic and jilted ex-lover who had a suitcase full of cash taken from him by our lady of craps pictured above. Kilmer plays a mob-indebted widdower who decides to help her get away from Madsen by faking her death. The one film class I took in college was about film noir so I'm going to briefly list all the tropes of this genre that are featured in this movie: detective protagonist, barren setting (desert), venetian blinds, neon signs, smoking cigarettes, elaborate use of shadow, scorchingly hot but troublesome female love interest. You see, it's basically "The Maltese Falcon" in Nevada. There's some running away through a Native American reservation that I feel obligated to point out because of Kilmer's partially indiginous background and the prevalence of such characters in the next two movies.

For a movie with a movie star couple, they actually seem to have legitimate chemistry so it's not as unsufferable as similar vehicles. It's a decent if not especially memorible movie to close out the decade.

Willow (1988)

I'm going to tell you a story. It's a fantasy tale about a mystical land in which a village of half-sized humans encounter a foreign object sought by an evil foreign power that will burn the world down to get to this potentially game-changing object. The half-sized critter cursed enough to find themselves tasked with the burden of carrying this object is encouraged by a wizard to take it on a great and perilous journey in order to preserve goodness in the face of the spreading forces of evil. Thankfully, the helpless and moderately annoying half-sized guy meets a mighty human swordsman of mysterious origins who helps them to fight off the armies of evildoers. The swordsman finds himself in the midst of a complicated romance with a princess of sorts. Also, an evil sorcerer and a benevolent wizard fight it out by magically flinging each other through the air of the evil wizard's tower. The half sized guy survives all this and returns heroically to his boring little village.

Obviously, you'd think I was talking about the "Lord Of the Rings" trilogy, but you'd be wrong. It's "Willow." "But they ripped off LOTR" you will protest. Alas, you're mistaken, I will assure you, for Lord of the Rings was not released until 2001, a full 14 years after "Willow" got its nerd on in theaters. Directed by Ron Howard and 'written' by George Lucas, I'm amazed that I hadn't really ever heard of it before. Dear readers, I must inform you that if that comparison to Lord of the Rings is allowed, Val Kilmer, as Madartigan, is the Aragorn of this shit.


I could spend the whole post going through point by point how the script (written by George Lucas, so you know it'll nuke the fridge!) is um... inspired by (read: directly ripped off from) the J.R.R. Tolkein Lord of the Rings Trilogy. But that would be boring and reveal the depths of my own nerdiness in a way that I'm just not comfortable with right now. So let me take it in a more general direction.

Willow is the name of the hobbit-like main character. He's played by a real-life tiny guy named Warwick Davis whose filmography reads like a fantasy based bookstore gone bad. At this time he would have been fresh off his success at playing Wickett the Ewok in "Return of the Jedi." He rescues a baby, Moses-style, from a riverbed without knowing an evil queen is looking for it. The hobbits are called "Pecks" by humans but I think we're suppossed to assume it's mildly derogatory, I'm not really sure. So Willow and some other Pecks take the baby over the hills to deliver it to the first human they see, who happens to be Val Kilmer in a cage. Kilmer is a swordsman named Madmartigan who is a soldier for no real country and kind of a total badass. Kilmer ends up helping Willow try to keep this baby from falling into the hands of the evil queen Bavmorda's forces. These names... seriously George Lucas, what were you thinking? So Queen Bavmorda sends her general and warrior daughter after this baby which has been prophesized as a threat to her empire. Why does that sound so familiar? Oh yeah, that's almost what happened with Jesus. So let's expand the source material of Willow to include the New Testament.

Most of the movie consists of a threat chasing after Willow and Madmortigan and Willow shouting in an annoying manner something along the lines of "Madmortigan, hurry! They're coming, Madmortigan!" Val Kilmer slices a bunch of evildoers down and is ruggedly charming. He seduces the evil queen's daughter. The evil but easily seduced princess is played by Joanne Whaley who would soon thereafter marry Kilmer for twelve years and mother two of his children (in real life).

There's so much more going on in this movie but it all kind of requires a big explanation (the good wizard is stuck in an animal's body but can talk... ?) so I'm going to summarize it by saying that because George Lucas touched this, good triumphs over evil and they all live happily ever after. Also, of the Kilmer movies I've seen so far, I enjoyed this one the most.

Top Gun (1986)

If your like me, you probably had fond memories of "Top Gun" from your childhood. Tom Cruise was, in my young mind, the barometer of late Cold War manliness with his motorcycle and jet fighting. Having just watched it again for TKP, I was puzzled by how terrible of a movie it really is. At the end of the day "Top Gun" is just a complicated hot-for-teacher story about an irresponsible naval aviator with severe daddy issues. Not only that, this movie, released in the later part of Ronald Reagan's second term is so myopic about the implications of the Cold War that it's unbelievable. Let me explain:

Of all the movies that have ever starred Val Kilmer, this one probably needs the least introduction (other than "Batman Forever"). Just about everyone saw "Top Gun" when they were growing up. It was a mega-hit and propelled Tom Cruise from a doofus dancing around a living room in his underwear to a doofus of an action movie star. Kilmer's supporting role as Tom "Iceman" Kazanski propelled him to bigger and better things and so this movie is almost definitely responsible for the blog you're now reading.

The story is about the Navy's advanced training camp for its top pilots. Tom Cruise plays Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, a hot shot pilot who is the son of another hot shot pilot who went inexplicably missing and whose whereabouts are 'classified.' Maverick's partner is Anthony Edwards, aka "Goose,"
(aka Dr. Mark Greene on E.R. - seriously, he aged terribly)

Anyway they manage to get nominated to the Top Gun school through sheer ballsiness... and by default since the other guy quit. The pilots compete in training exercises and are awarded points. The winner gets his name on a plaque and can be a flight instructor in the Top Gun program (whoo hoo!).

Val Kilmer is the favorite to win the contest because he's... what's the word, competent. I always remembered Iceman as being this huge villain, but after having just watched it again, I'm pretty convinced that he's got a point. Basically, his beef with Maverick is that Maverick (as his McCain-inspiring nickname ought to foreshadow) is reckless and his mistakes will end up getting people in killed. This seems like a fairly straightforward critique. Maverick is kind of a jackass who doesn't care to follow military discipline and the more straight laced soldier doesn't respect him because of it.

And you'll never believe what happens! Maverick's aggressive flying leads to his plane stalling in midair and Dr. Goose dying. Also, Iceman actually wins the Top Gun contest! Did anyone else not remember this? I guess I was always under the impression that Maverick was the Top Gun, but he's not. Your led to believe that somehow Maverick's the hero because... well I don't know really, he sleeps with his teacher? He's aggressive? He's sad about being personally responsible for making his best friend's wife a widow? He recklessly endangers the lives of the crew members in the control tower for his own selfish amusement by flying perilously close to it at a high speed? When you think about it, Iceman is totally right to not respect Maverick. Iceman is a paragon of accountability. He's a reliable and skilled pilot who doesn't seem to have an F-14 Tomcat's worth of personal issues to deal with. Kilmer plays the sort of pilot our country should hope for in its service members. Cruise plays a guy who will probably get shook up after combat and end up a burnt out bum with a sign pleading for help for a vet.

That said "Top Gun" does set up an interestingly confrontational dynamic between Tom "Mr. Scientology" Cruise and Val Kilmer, a Christian Scientist (not to be confused with the aforementioned L. Ron Hubbard nonsense). One thing's for certain: not a lot of pharmaceuticals around the set with these two as the leads. Also, I'm pretty sure this is the only movie that they were in together.

I'm aware this has gotten long but I do want to touch briefly on one other point. The battle scene near the end of the movie is so preposterous. When during the later point of the cold war did Migs (as in the fighter jets of the Soviet Union) and US aircraft actually ever come even remotely close to engaging in combat? The movie's plot has a downed communication ship about to be blown up by a Mig fighters. Why? Don't worry about it? They're the evil empire? Fine. But why would the Migs willing engage the US fighters and risk World War III? It's nonsensical. It's just a convenient plot device that allows this expensive military hardware to be actually be used. Imagine how boring of a movie it would be if they just did the engage, retreat without firing a shot thing that happens at the beginning of the movie (and most likely did happen whenever either side encroached on the other's airspace). Why is the navy in the Indian Ocean in the first place? It's unexplainable militarism like this that makes people like me unable to enjoy brainless action movies.
In conclusion, that volleyball scene does not connect to any other part of the story at all, whatsoever. It's five minutes of absolutely shameless filler... but look at those bods.

Real Genius (1985)

This was another Kilmer movie that I hadn't really heard of prior to the launch of TKP. I've learned from some friends, however, that this movie is regarded in the pantheon of classic 80s teen comedies. It's easy to see why. This movie has at least one training montage with an 80s ballad playing over it.

The premise is that a bright but helplessly nerdy 15 year old overachieves his way into a prestigious college's science department on a scholarship. He's tasked with working on a high power laser project that has hit a couple roadblocks in its development. He is intensely committed and quickly bests his older syncophantic co-researchers.

His roommate (Val Kilmer) is a wild, loose cannon, party animal type who refuses to live up to his obvious potential. It's a character that was reprised in the 90s by Jeremy Piven in "PCU" and in 2002's "Van Wilder" by Ryan Reynolds. Kilmer, being the broseph that he is, reaches out to his incredibly nerdy new lab partner/dormmate and teaches him all the joys irresponsibility: flirting with girls, turning a lecture hall into a swimming pool, using science to turn your dorm hallway into a sheet of ice, etc. It's essentially the same character he played in Top Secret but a little more excitable and the ability to science exclusively for the purposes of recreation.

We learn early on that their professor is schilling his lab work for a defense contractor who is going to turn his laser into a killing machine that blasts people from space. An expensive and bizaare 1980s boondangle made commonplace by another actor. Kilmer's incessant partying leads to his almost-expulsion from college when the laser weapon isn't ready in time. This leads to a training montage as Kilmer studies his ass off and finds a new way to make the laser work (because he's a 'real genius'?).

The final act of the movie is an insane plot twist in which the professor takes his death ray to the military to be tested (no peer review? what sort of clown college is that anyway?). Kilmer and his still hopelessly nerdy and awestruck roommate concoct a zany scheme, featuring a cameo by an early version of the internet, to stop the villainous military-industrialists. They sneak onto the military base and reroute the laser to blow up their teachers house [with popcorn(?!)] thus saving humanity from its warlike urges and ushering in an unending era of peace and prospertiy that continues unabated to this day.

For an 80s staple this movie has almost none of the classic songs of that era. I don't know how they got stuck with all the no-hit-wonders but I hadn't heard any of these songs before. Still, it followed a lot of 80s tropes and probably raised Kilmer's profile more than Top Secret.

Top Secret (1984)

When I first loaded up my Netflix queue with Val Kilmer movies in order to begin The Kilmer Project, I was hopeful. But by the time "Top Secret" arrived I was beginning to have second thoughts about the whole experiment. Here's a 1984 movie that I had never heard of and wasn't especially fondly remembered by critics. I wondered how much of this I would actually want to suffer through. Within five minutes of "Top Secret" I knew I had made the right choice.

This comedy tells the implausible story of a spy ring in East Germany that attempts to stop the Germans from gaining a weapon of mass destruction by rescuing a kidnapped scientist. Val Kilmer plays a US rock star whose big hit is called "Skeet Surfin'" which is the passtime of grabbing a twelve gauge shotgun and a surfboard and heading out onto the waves to shoot at clay pigeons launched from the beach. It's bizaare. The whole movie is in that campy sort of joke-a-minute slapstick political spoof that would later manifest itself in the Hot Shots movies of the 90s. The writers mine as many jokes as they can out of the idea of East Germany being a Stalinist police state. Ha! The cold war! Hilarious! Apparently almost all of the German dialouge is actually Yiddish which substitutes surprisingly well, though judging by the IMDB Trivia page it's kind of a lot inside jokes for the handful of the surving Yiddish speakers in the world. Otherwise it's a lot of kind of crude but PG-13 humor that you might expect in an 80s gagfest such as this.

As for Kilmer, apparently he is actually singing the goofy songs that his Elvis/Beach Boys character performs throughout the movie and he was even featured on the soundtrack performing under his character's name (Nick Rivers). His hair is immaculately feathered in the finest of 80s fashion (though I noted a continuity problem where he got an unexplained haircut about halfway through) and his Elvis-ish rock star role is played as a sort of earnest frat boy. Some of the songs in this movie are so weird that they're kind of worth hearing.

Ultimately the movie is the furthest thing from timeless. It's got jokes about the Ford Pinto and the Carter administration. Honestly, I'm not even sure if kids growing up today would even understand the whole East Germany/Soviet Bloc cold war stuff. Nonetheless, this was Kilmer's first big role and a great start to The Kilmer Project.