Val Kilmer’s Best Movies
Real Genius celebrates its 40th anniversary!
Across a 40-plus-year career, the late Val Kilmer was confounding and difficult to define both on- and off-screen, and intentionally so. An actor that seemed to have a sixth sense for the right way to do things, much to the consternation of movie directors, Kilmer grew from young leading man to action star to humorous, yet compelling supporting cast member before a final documentary that offered an intimate look into his unique life and career. Here’s an overview of some of Kilmer’s greatest roles, followed by a Tomatometer ranking of his entire filmography.
TOP SECRET! (1984): This Julliard-trained actor burst forth fully formed in the mid-1980s, when Kilmer was discovered by the legendary Airplane! comedy trio David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker and cast as the lead in Top Secret!, a send-up of the Elvis movies and spy capers. Kilmer plays an Elvis pastiche with a dazzling smile, and in between bananas dance numbers and joining the French Resistance, he manages to steal the entire movie away from luminary supporting cast members like Peter Cushing and Omar Sharif.
Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert on Top Secret!: “Instead of a plot, it has a funny young actor named Val Kilmer as the hero, a 1950s-style American rock ‘n’ roller who is sent on a concert tour behind the Iron Curtain, and manages to reduce East Germany to a shambles while never missing a word of ‘Tutti Frutti’ (he never even stumbles during a wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a lop-bam-boom).”
REAL GENIUS (1985): Only a year later, Kilmer returned in the nerds-versus-military caper Real Genius. Again, Kilmer’s character seems to take control of the movie as the handsome, disaffected yet brilliant college student Chris Knight. You’ll never forget Kilmer’s off-kilter lines about having a dream where pickles are being thrown at him, and the immortal last words of Socrates. Scroll to the end to catch up on some movie clips!
Washington Post’s Paul Attanasio on Real Genius: “The movie, though, is Val Kilmer’s. With his hair swirling above his ears like pasta thrown at the wall, the way his big mouth jumps out in a smile, Kilmer sits on the cusp between great-looking and weird-looking. He walks through Real Genius with a kind of spread-out swagger, cackling profusely, defying everyone with one-liners — he’s got a kind of Bugs Bunny quality (he even asks Hathaway, ‘What’s up, Doc?’).”
TOP GUN (1986) & TOP GUN: MAVERICK (2022): Under contract to Paramount and obligated to appear as an action star despite blowing his audition according to his autobiography, Kilmer intentionally played Iceman in Top Gun as an intense blowhard, defining the character himself out of whole cloth because nobody else would do it.
36 years later and at the end of his career, Kilmer returned in the sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, as the same character, but this time dying of cancer, and his inspirational cameo turn offers critical advice to Tom Cruise’s Maverick at a key moment in the film.
The Ringer’s Adam Nayman on Top Gun: “Over and over again, Iceman states his problems with Maverick, but the almost self-parodic intensity of Kilmer’s acting—his sneering, lascivious contempt for Cruise—seems to come from somewhere deep inside, and may be a response to his irritation with the movie itself.”
AV Club’s Todd Gilchrist on Top Gun: Maverick: “[Glen] Powell shines among the rest of the new recruits as Rooster’s nemesis, a next-generation version of Val Kilmer’s Iceman, even as Kilmer shows up for a brief and tender cameo highlighting both the wisdom that comes with getting older, and the heartbreaking vulnerability.”
WILLOW (1988): After having his way with science fiction, George Lucas set his sights on the fantasy genre with Willow. Inspiration was taken from The Lord of the Rings and the classical texts, with Warwick Davis starring as a budding magician entrusted with the care of a baby prophesized to end an evil queen’s rule. On his journey, Willow meets Madmartigan, the suave but frequently harried warrior played by Kilmer. His first appearance in the film, trapped in an elevated outdoor cage and left to die, gives the story a big jolt, with Kilmer delivering a touch of modern cynicsm to this refined and precious film.
Time Out’s Tom Huddleston on Willow: “Kilmer’s performance as the wisecracking Madmartigan (great name) feels like a true star turn, packed with breezy charisma.”
THE DOORS (1991): Kilmer’s next great role was one of a few that he seemed born to play: the doomed leading man Jim Morrison of the psychedelic rock band The Doors, a passion project by conspiracy-minded filmmaker Oliver Stone. Kilmer blows the doors off the film (pun intended) with a performance worthy of the Lizard King himself.
LA Times’ Michael Wilmington on The Doors: “Stone has chosen his cast amazingly well. Kilmer’s Morrison is a visual triumph, and the actor pulls a Raging Bull-style metamorphosis from pouty acid Adonis to booze-belly drunk with oddly tender panache.”
TOMBSTONE (1993): And then there’s Doc Holliday in Tombstone. One of a pair of Wyatt Earp-themed films released by competing studios with close-by release dates, the other, Kevin Costner one had the disadvantage of not having Kilmer as Holliday turning in one of the all-time great Western performances. Kilmer fully inhabits Holliday as a tuberculosis-cursed dandy who’s the best pistol shot of them all, and proves it repeatedly. If Kilmer wasn’t your Huckleberry before seeing this movie, he certainly was afterward.
CBR’s Martin Carr on Tombstone: “Kurt Russell might have his name on the marquee in Tombstone, but Val Kilmer walks away with every frame. A debonair depiction of Southern civility, cloaked in tuberculosis, who fires from the hip. Kilmer comes at this historical figure with a true artist’s eye for human frailty.”
HEAT (1995): By the mid-90s and at maximum star stature, Kilmer still took powerhouse supporting roles, especially when directors like Michael Mann were involved. Though Heat is ostensibly a showcase for Robert DeNiro’s criminal Neil McCauley and Al Pacino’s detective Lt. Vincent Hanna, Kilmer really shines here as DeNiro’s reluctant and romantic right-hand man.
Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen on Heat: “Val Kilmer is a presence unto himself as Neil’s protege, a sharpshooter who admires his boss’s guile yet can’t abide his credo – he’s attached at the hip to his wife (‘For me, the sun rises and sets on her’), and his fate is an ironic joke at Neil’s expense, a sly aside sneaked quietly into the folds of the script.”
BATMAN FOREVER (1995): In the same year as Heat, Kilmer took over for Batman at the same time Joel Schumacher took over from Tim Burton, creating a movie, Batman Forever, that was much more of a throwback to the 1960s Batman TV series with Adam West than the grim, severe (but excellent) pair of Burton films. Kilmer’s Batman and Bruce Wayne was allowed to laugh and emit one-liners and still be intense, playing effectively against maniac villains Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face and Jim Carrey as the Riddler.
LA Times’ Kenneth Turan on Batman Forever: “To start at the top, Val Kilmer, a late-inning replacement for Michael Keaton, brings his ice-cold Top Gun persona to the dual role of caped crime-fighter and billionaire businessman Bruce Wayne and the fit is perfect. With steely eyes, inflectionless speech and a Zen-like calm, Kilmer is adept at both the heroic and the humorous aspects of his conflicted personality.”
KISS KISS BANG BANG (2005): Skipping ahead a decade and through a bunch of less-than-good movies lands us on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the debut of eclectic virtuoso action filmmaker Shane Black, who intentionally cast two actors on the comeback trail in a metatextual buddy comedy with fourth walls breaking all over the place. The first actor was Robert Downey Jr., who parlayed this nervous thief turned actor turned detective, his favorite role, into a career second act in Iron Man a few years later. The other was Kilmer, playing exasperated and deadpan as the immortal Gay Perry.
The Atlantic’s Christopher Orr on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang: “Kilmer’s Perry may be gay, but in narrative terms he’s the straight man, and Kilmer portrays him with deadpan assurance, never falling back on comic stereotype.”
VAL (2021): Lastly, there’s Kilmer’s documentary about himself, his life, and his career, Val, told mostly through home movies from a camera that Kilmer carried everywhere on film sets, back when such things were unwieldy and didn’t fit in your pocket. Kilmer’s movie is narrated by his son, who sounds remarkably like him, and though Kilmer had a reputation for being difficult to work with, this documentary instead celebrates his life, through good times and bad, and good films and bad.
Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt on Val: “So it’s some kind of cosmic irony, maybe, that the voice he lost several years ago to throat cancer comes through as vibrantly and insistently as it does in Val, a new documentary streaming on Prime Video that is by turns indulgent, bittersweet, and profoundly moving.”
Kilmer’s Best Films by Tomatometer
Kilmer’s autobiographical documentary and his Top Gun sequel cameo ended up being the final bookend on an eclectic career, full of spectacular, idiosyncratic performances. Here they all are by Tomatometer score, with Certified Fresh Films first. (Steve Horton, Alex Vo)
96%
93%
93%
86%
86%
84%
79%
79%
77%
76%
100%
91%
77%
70%
68%
66%
63%
63%
60%
59%
58%
57%
56%
55%
52%
51%
47%
43%
41%
40%
40%
39%
34%
33%
32%
30%
26%
25%
24%
25%
23%
23%
20%
19%
18%
15%
14%
12%
7%
