Val Kilmer was ridiculously handsome. Seeing him in his prime on the big screen again is an almost absurd experience. He was so much taller and blonder and better-looking than everyone around him, like some sort of storybook Nordic prince. Kilmer, who died in April at the age of 65, could have very easily coasted on his looks, yet he had the restless, playful spirit of a character actor trapped in the body of a leading man. Taking another look at the films in the Brattle Theatre’s retrospective “Kilmer Forever: Remembering Val Kilmer,” one comes away with an even deeper appreciation of how much the actor loved to undercut his matinee idol appearance. Our Iceman may have looked like a golden god, but he was often a very silly goose.
Only the Brattle would schedule Kilmer’s turn as ponytailed terrorist Dieter von Cunth in 2010’s R-rated “Saturday Night Live” spinoff “MacGruber” on the same night as “Heat,” director Michael Mann’s 1995 masterpiece co-starring Kilmer as a heartbroken bank robber holding his own against Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in a movie that’s like an all-star game for Method tough guys. Yet such was the expanse of his talent that Kilmer could be so committed and believable in both films. And with the same haircut!
Once the youngest actor ever accepted into Juilliard, the classically trained Kilmer made the leap from stage to screen not in highfalutin dramas but in two beloved, goofball comedies. 1984’s “Top Secret!” and the following year’s “Real Genius” weren’t box office hits but found appreciative audiences on cable and home video, where kids of my generation grew up on Kilmer’s crack comic timing and exuberant physicality.
I wish the Brattle had been able to book his career-defining performances in “Tombstone” and “The Doors,” and lord knows we could talk all day about “Top Gun” and the beautiful curtain call Tom Cruise and company arranged for the ailing actor in its 2022 sequel. But the Brattle series makes a fine showcase for some of Kilmer’s less-remarked-upon work, starting with the sturdy, neo-noir pleasures of John Dahl’s 1989 “Kill Me Again” (May 13).
Kilmer could play dumb better than most, and he’s just the right shade of dim here as a private dick smart enough to help a femme fatale fake her own death, but not quite savvy enough to figure out when he’s being played. What’s terrific about the picture — the first and most bare-bones in Dahl’s unofficial trilogy that continued with “Red Rock West” and “The Last Seduction” — is how Kilmer and the cast are able to inhabit classic B-movie movie archetypes without any self-consciousness or postmodern irony. Take out the f-words, switch it to black-and-white and the film could have been made in 1949. That’s a compliment.
Kilmer scored top-billing for a supporting role in Ron Howard’s dreadful fantasy epic “Willow” (May 17 and May 18), an off-brand “Lord of the Rings” knockoff with a sour story by George Lucas, who was at that point cash-strapped and embittered by one of Hollywood’s most famously expensive divorces. Kilmer gets the Han Solo role of a cocky swordsman helping the wholesome hero, and he’s the only person in the movie having any fun. He spends the first half of the picture wearing a dress, then he’s dosed with love potion and falls for the villainous warrior woman who’s after his head. During the climax, he gets turned into a pig.
The thin-skinned filmmakers named one of the villains General Kael, a nod to The New Yorker’s film critic Pauline Kael, who cannily noted in her review that the suddenly single Lucas had come up with a story in which all the power is wielded by evil women. While the writer’s doleful Biblical borrowings and shrieking, pidgin English sidekicks foretold much of what was to come in “The Phantom Menace,” the star’s amusingly unheroic antics set the template for another Disney franchise altogether. Captain Jack Sparrow owes an awful lot to Kilmer’s Madmartigan.
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The Brattle’s 35mm screening of “Heat” (May 15) offers a rare chance to see the film as it originally played in theaters without the famously meddling director’s tweaks to the digital incarnations. (I will never forgive Mann for snipping Pacino’s “Ferocious, aren’t I?” from the new video versions.) Kilmer plays the most lethal of De Niro’s killer crew, moving with such coiled menace and weapons expertise that actual drill sergeants use clips of his reloading technique to teach new recruits. Yet at the same time, he’s the most vulnerable dude in the movie. Note Kilmer’s lightning-quick look of abandonment when De Niro announces that this will be their last job, or witness the utter devastation of his stoic farewell to wife Ashley Judd, where we see all a man’s hopes for future happiness draining silently from his eyes.
Straight heroism never suited him. Some people I respect have tried to make a case for Kilmer’s one-off stint as the Caped Crusader in “Batman Forever” (May 19) but I’m too distracted by director Joel Schumacher’s gaudy neon carnival to spot the tongue-in-cheek twinkle they claim is in his eyes. To me, he just looks bored. And by his own admission, a bored Val Kilmer was a bad thing for movie shoots. Tales of his on-set misbehavior came to overshadow his talent, most notoriously during the disastrous production of 1996’s “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (May 14).
Pairing Kilmer with Method acting’s original hunky weirdo Marlon Brando probably sounded like a match made in heaven, except they hated each other. The film burned through directors before finally being finished by grizzled Hollywood veteran John Frankenheimer, who succinctly summed up the experience by saying: “Will Rogers never met Val Kilmer.” There are a few good gonzo moments here if you like watching miserable oddballs try to capsize a movie — Brando does a whole scene with an ice bucket on his head — but the headliners have far less screen time than you’d hope, with Frankenheimer’s damage control efforts structuring most of the movie around boring co-stars David Thewlis and Fairuza Balk.
The greatest comeback movie nobody saw, 2005’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (May 13 and May 20) teamed Kilmer with Robert Downey Jr. as bickering detectives solving a Hollywood homicide in a fast and furiously funny thriller written and directed by hard-boiled scribe Shane Black. Downey was fresh out of the slammer and basically unemployable, while Kilmer was still lingering in career jail for “Moreau” and similar shenanigans. Producer Joel Silver took a big gamble on these two and it paid off everywhere except the box office. (The film grossed a meager $4.2 million in the U.S.)
The only buddy movie named after a Pauline Kael book of criticism, the film is itself something of an autocritique, with Downey’s wiseacre narration riffing on the tropes of a genre that Black helped codify in films like “Lethal Weapon” and “The Last Boy Scout.” Downey stars as a petty thief pretending to be an actor who gets thrown together with Kilmer’s suave Los Angeles private investigator Perry Van Shrike, nicknamed Gay Perry, because… well, he’s gay. The proudly out and sassy tough guy might not be as big a deal today, but in a mainstream action movie 20 years ago, this was unheard of. Downey’s motormouthed mania bounces off Kilmer’s smooth, Iceman cool, the two upending action movie cliches and correcting each other’s grammar while cracking a murder mystery concocted by a killer who’s seen and read too many murder mysteries.
Yet the movie’s knowing asides never devolve into glibness or snark. The dramatic moments in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” have real heft and the deaths in the movie mean something. For a film that breaks the fourth wall early and often, the final scenes are surprisingly moving. (That is, until Kilmer and Downey interrupt the closing credits to apologize to moviegoers in the Midwest for saying the f-word so much.) In a perfect world, these two would have teamed up to solve a few more mysteries, instead of Downey going on to play Iron Man nine times.
When he was in town for a screening at the Boston Film Festival prior to the film’s release, Kilmer gave me the strangest interview of my career, noting that when a script is this good, his job is just a matter of finding the right sideburns. (They are magnificent.)
There’s an impish glee with which Kilmer uses the character to confound traditional modes of screen masculinity, at one point saving the day thanks to a two-shot Derringer that Perry hides in his crotch, where homophobes are afraid to frisk him. “This isn’t good cop bad cop,” he warns while he and Downey interrogate a henchman, offering an unprintable alternative description of a stock movie scene. Black’s screenplay is constantly kidding and commenting on itself like that, a perfect vehicle for an actor who spent his career trying to subvert his own image.
“Kilmer Forever: Remembering Val Kilmer” runs at the Brattle Theatre through Tuesday, May 20.