The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by Kyle Brandt to honor the late Val Kilmer in ‘The Saint,’ who stars alongside Elisabeth Shue. Watch this episode on our Ringer Movies youTube channel! Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Jessie Lopez, Jon Jones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the significance of Val Kilmer in 'The Saint'?
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The Rewatchables, brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network. You can get this podcast as a video on Spotify. I would highly encourage you to do so. You can also go on the Ringer Movies YouTube channel and see a bunch of old Rewatchables that we've done, including ones with Kyle Brandt, who's here today. Val Kilmer passed away. We're going to talk about one of our favorite Val Kilmer movies.
Not a movie you probably expected, The Saint. It's next.
For an American scientist caught in a world of espionage, there is no escape. Brings her to life. And now, the man who was hired to betray her. My name is Thomas Moore. The August Christopher Martini Boris. Is the only one who can save her. If you want to live, you can leave my side. Val Kilmer. Elizabeth Shue. I love! The Saint. Starts Friday, April 4th, everywhere.
All right, Kyle Brandt, you're basically, you were kind of semi-off this week. Kids were off from school. Wasn't really a rewatchables taping week for you, but you had to move stuff around because Val Kilmer passed away this week. People, I don't think it was a massive surprise because he'd been sick for a long time, yet it was a total surprise because Val Kilmer is no longer with us.
And we were texting. We had talked about doing The Saint forever, which I don't think would crack... Most people's top five Val Kilmer list, but for us, it does. And we'll get to that in a second. But Val Kilmer, big picture, 20,000 feet overhead. What are your thoughts?
Yeah, I've been really moved by this, more so than I even expected to be over the last 48 hours. I've been upset. I've been on our show, Good Morning Football, talking about it as much as the NFL will allow me to just talk about an actor and not Cam Ward or Shadur Sanders. And I think I'm a little surprised how upsetting it was because... This is not Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford or Tom Hanks.
It's not one of these like all time leading man legends. It's just someone who has shown up for in our life for years and years and was always cool. And I'm looking at him, Bill. It's like we lost the coolest character actor of all time. And that I think really was what he was. And that's really his legacy.
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Chapter 2: How does Kilmer's performance compare to other leading actors?
He's going on the flight attendant. I don't like you because you're dangerous. You're dangerous. Do you want decaf?
Well, I shave with a Mach 3. If you think you're dead, all right, Tom. It's a perfect sketch. He made fun of himself. And it's funny, Bill, because, like, it's a pretty serious guy. It's a very serious actor. You know, like, we can get into the whole thing. If people don't know, like... Oh, I'm ready right now. Let's do it. Youngest student ever into Juilliard in New York City.
And if you've never seen like his upbringing, this guy grows up in Chatsworth in LA in the Valley. He's got a couple of brothers. His younger brother is like the creative one in the family. He's the director. He's going to go on and be the successful brother. His younger brother dies in the family jacuzzi at 15 years old, like just dies there right there on the property.
And shortly after that, Kilmer shows up at Juilliard and like, let's act. And he is like a true, true thespian who is all about characters, acting, method, all of it. But then he wound up in movies like Top Gun, which just are for kicking ass and eating popcorn, which was fun.
And he could do comedies. Yep. He could do weird accent movies. He could do weird part movies. And he would say over and over again, whatever movie he was doing, he needed some sort of challenge, some sort of thing that made it interesting to him.
And it's funny because in the 90s, when all the magazines kind of showed up, people covering the industry just got way better in all these different ways. The internet's coming in the late 90s. But there was an awareness I had, just somebody living in Boston who liked movies and knew nothing other than what I read of like, oh, Val Kilmer's kind of difficult.
Yeah.
That became a thing with him and it kind of added to just the mystique of him. Like he does Batman once and he's signed to do other ones and they basically like let him out because he was kind of a pain in the ass. By the mid-90s, Pain in the ass, Val Kilmer. And it was kind of like hard to say what was real and what wasn't real.
There was an Entertainment Weekly story about him in 96 that kind of hammered him. Premiere had this piece about him in 97. I have some quotes, but EW in 96 called him Mr. Unpopularity. Mm-hmm. He was saying how he was committing six million a picture and nobody liked working with him, which I don't think was totally true.
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Chapter 3: What are the themes explored in 'The Saint'?
It's fucking bullshit. I love this gimmick. There's a couple other things I love, but we got to do the disguises now. I can't wait for the categories. It's so early. I have everything written down. You guys want some coffee or something? Go, do your thing. Do your thing with the disguises.
They're the best. You said like it's a great hang movie or airplane movie because the lead character changes every 10 minutes and you get a different cool voice from Kilmer and he just gets to cook. So I did a top five. I got the top five, my top five characters in this. All right. And I'll start with number five. Number five is at the end of the embassy. It's Southern accent goatee guy.
Little tombstone in there. Yeah.
He's number five because he sounds like Doc Holliday. And it's like, oh, shit, he's doing Doc. And he has to get into the file himself. Number four, Spanish guy on plane who's swinging the medallion. Yeah.
Super Jim Morrison. Like, once again, dips into past roles. It's a little Jim Morrison ish.
He's got a little bit of the lizard King. His hair almost looks like Ron Perlman and beauty and the beast. He's got number three. Um, I got the, uh, the old, the grumpy, uh, cold fusion, mumbo jumbo. You don't believe in this type of stuff. I like him. He's like a cross between Ernie McCracken and Joseph Lieberman. Like he's just all over the place.
That's my three teeth, right?
Terrible teeth, terrible comb over, and he hits on the young girl. Two, I got a German lipstick guy. It's so early. Do you want some coffee or something? Love in the train terminal with the lipstick and everything.
That's the one I wrote. His name's Bruno, right?
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Chapter 4: How did the film's production affect its reception?
And there's other stuff from that year, too, that's even worse. So he was in the 92 Oscars. Here's what we have for that one.
Okay, let's go.
Hopkins, Silence of the Lambs. Not going to argue.
No.
De Niro and Cape Fear. No argument.
Max Cady.
Robin Williams and the Fisher King. Pretty good. Nick Tolti, Prince of Tides. Maybe. I don't know. Warren Beatty and Bugsy. But Bugsy's just infuriating. Bugsy's all over the place in the Oscars. And it's like, really, Val Kilmer? He sings all of the music as Jim Morrison in the doors, not to mention everything else. So I think that was the one for him that he got boned on personally.
And remind me, that would have been before everyone started shitting on how hard difficulty was, or maybe that's part of that.
No, that was before. He made it through a movie with Oliver Stone, who I don't exactly think was Mr. Drummond from Facts of Life.
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Chapter 5: What are the most memorable scenes from 'The Saint'?
Listen, I had this for Benihana. This is a movie that features Red Square in Moscow. And I'm still like, I don't know. The Russian mafia rat race prostitute coke den is pretty badass. Bill, they have a fucking mariachi band inexplicably there. I don't know why. That place is wild. I want to party there.
I love this scene. And then we have Simon dressed up like Trediak going, you know what the hardest part of being you is? Pretending to be bad in bed. Whoa. Next one is Emma confronting Simon after he's escaped. And she somehow figures out right away where he is, which we'll get to in picking nets. But she says, I would have given them to you if you asked, being in the cold fusion.
I like calling it cold fusion. I don't even know if I'm right. Is that what it's called? Yeah. Cold fusion, right? Cold fusion. Yeah, exactly.
That's like the whole thing.
Why doesn't Starbucks use cold fusion ice instead of doing the cold brew? Why don't they add like a cold fusion? Because it doesn't, it doesn't even necessarily exist or be the right thing. We have a cold fusion macchiato.
No sugar for Bill. For Bill.
With three, with a triple nonfat vanilla. It sounds like something my daughter would order. Okay. Here's my favorite scene. I'm just going to tell you this is my most rewatchable. Simon and Emma escape from Ilya and his crew. They watch out of the river and they're running alongside the ice on the river, which is just fucking cool. It's definitely one of those, how did they do this?
How did they not fall in? And then Val has to go in the water. I think this also gets great shock. Order of word. Val's, I think, going to be dead in two minutes, maybe 30 seconds in that water. He's looking up. He's looking up again. She pulls him out. Really good stuff. We needed like two more of these scenes in this movie.
I remember being in the theater in this scene and people were losing their minds. They could not believe that they were pulling this off. And I hate to have this angle on. I'm watching it yesterday and I was like, Tom Cruise does this before he has breakfast now. I've seen this so many times done way bigger. At the time in 97, it was like, wow, Kilmer's holding his breath for that long?
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