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!).