Spartan (2004)

First, let's take a moment to commemorate 20 years of Kilmer in cinema. He's come a long way and he's still going... somewhere.

Spartan is a return to Kilmer-as-hero form. He plays something of a Secret Service contractor. That is to say that he trains the Secret Service on some really intense ways to track down fugitives and protect America's geopolitical interests. The movie opens with him training a new class of agents out in the boonies. But get this, Kilmer's character is so above the fray (and apparently with such an ironclad security clearance) that he only moonlights as the rawest special agent in the entire world. Most of the time he's a down to earth farmer. Our heroic man of the soil returns to his farm after completing a training course only to be immediately called back to Washington by the Secret Service on an incredibly important mission: the daughter of the unnamed President of the United States has been kidnapped because the (one?) agent in her detail ran off to meet some girl instead of protecting her like he was supposed to. Once Kilmer aggressively coerces this confession out of him, the disgraced agent appropriately commits suicide.

Now Kilmer is called into action to track down the President's daughter before it gets released to the news media which would obviously be a pretty big blow to all parties involved. So after some crafty detective work, Kilmer and his cagey partner find out that she's been drugged and abducted by international sex traffickers. At this point the plot of the movie converges almost identically with "Taken," the Liam Neesen movie where he karate chops his way through Europe to save his daughter from sex traffickers. Kilmer and his partner begin a daring chase after the girl, only to find themselves constantly one step behind. Then a plot twist that would derail a lesser movie emerges: the girl's body has been discovered drowned off the coast of the Atlantic.

So that's it right? Wrong. Turns out it wasn't the girl at all. Turns out the President never loved his daughter and would rather have her considered dead than face the scandal of her security detail being reorganized to cover his laison with another woman while he was in town (which subsequently led to her - somehow accidental - kidnapping by sex traffickers. Well this is way too much for Val Kilmer to stand. He decides to track her down and rescue her no matter what the consequences. He's just that kind of guy. Also, the head of the secret service has somehow raised the girl. I don't know how the head of a nonpolitical security organization would have had any role in some politician's family life for the previous 20 years, but she made quite the emotional plea.

Kilmer goes to Europe, because he's got one hell of a moral compass. In his pursuit of this girl, I should add, at least three intelligence operatives that he talks into working with him on this off the books mission end up dead. He'd be in such deep shit in the actual bureaucratic world that it's mind boggling. Still, he manages to save this girl (played by the lovely Kristen Bell in a rare miss of a performance), he gets riddled with bullets and survives, and he kills William H. Macy's darkly evil political operative character. Basically it's a prequel to "Taken." For my money, I'd rather have the karate chopping:

Blind Horizon (2003)

Whatever happened to Neve Campbell? She had Scream, Wild Things, Party of Five, and then she totally fell off the radar. She's still made some movies but what a fall from grace. To wit, she's the femme fatale of this late period Kilmer noir movie.

Kilmer is found shot in the head in the southwest American desert. He awakes in a hospital in a small town with a severe case of amnesia. As he regains his strength he starts to have flashes of a plot to kill the President of the United States. Given the extent of his amnesia, he's not exactly fully stocked on the details so he's having a hard time convincing anyone about what exactly is going to happen. He's pretty troubled about it. Just look at him:The Secret Service is called in but they're far from convinced that he's believable considering that the President is not even planning on passing through the tiny Southwest town and Kilmer can't even remember that his name is Frank Kavanaugh. Neve Campbell shows up and claims to be his wife but there's something really off about their interactions. Kilmer starts flirting really aggressively with his nurse (Amy Smart) who looks just super foxy in this movie.

Kilmer starts going out drinking really hard. This sort of heightens the recurrence of his flashbacks.

Spoiler alert: There's a couple of shady co-conspirators in the town who pull off this massive diversion that ends up bringing the POTUS motorcade through the small town. Kilmer pulls off a massive turnaround on the co-conspirators. He gets the money he was going to be paid to be the triggerman, and kills off the would-be assassins. Hooray, but pretty forgettable.

The Missing (2003)

This movie is set in the old timey US frontier. Cate Blanchett plays a single mother homesteader who has a sort of flirtatious working relationship with Aaron Eckhart. Out of nowhere her estranged father who had run off to live with some manner of Pueblo Native American tribe shows up and is all like, "Hey, long time no see, I'm mystically aware of the natural world now and would like to reconnect with you and my grandkids." Cate Blanchett's pissed. She tells him to bounce and like a sad ol' dispossessed Native American, down the trail he goes.

Then, out of nowhere, her girls get snatched up by an Apache gang that's going to sell them to the owner of a Mexican whorehouse across the border. They kill Aaron Eckhart and Cate Blanchett is forced to call on crafty ol' Tommy Lee Jones to hunt them down and get them back.

Val Kilmer shows up only briefly as a semi corrupt US Cavalry officer who is ineffectively chasing down the Apaches. Apparently he agreed to appear in it as part of his role on the New Mexico Film Board, which tries to get movies to film in New Mexico (seriously).

This movie features one Batman (VK) and two Twofaces (Eckhart and T.L.Jones) but no x-men. I kind of love Tommy Lee Jones.