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.
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