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.