“My life is very strange. I don’t do anything normal.” So speaks Simon Templar, also known as the Saint, very late in the movie of the same name. By this point, there’s no real need for him to spell it out. It’s clear much earlier that Simon Templar, the gentleman-thief character from a series of old pulp novels and later a 1960s TV series, is a strange dude; that The Saint, the big-budget 1997 feature film centered around an updated version of the character, is a strange movie; and that Val Kilmer, the man playing Simon, is a particularly strange movie star, not least because he wanted to do The Saint in the first place. This was the movie that Kilmer essentially chose over following up his biggest leading-man hit, Batman Forever, with another Batman movie; though that George Clooney-starring sequel Batman & Robin turned out to be a good
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