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: