A comic book store owner once described Batman to me as a skeleton key; you could plug him into any kind of story. Kilmer is the only actor thus far who dug into Bruce Wayne and found the light inside the darkness. Kilmer turned the Batman key while other dudes just slammed themselves into the door. Kilmer and Schumacher had a legendary feud, making Batman Forever the rare film with a double-main-event beef (Tommy Lee Jones famously telling Jim Carrey how much he loathed him the first time they met on set). But in an interview from 2019, toward the end of Schumacherâs life, even he had to admit that Kilmer made a âfabulousâ Batman.
If Kilmerâs Batman was an act of adding levity to a character stuck in the mud, then his performance in 2004âs Spartan supplied the opposite. He’s a noble metal surrounded by diffuse energy. Initially derided and now a secret-handshake movie for David Mamet fans, conspiracy thriller fans, and fans of elliptical, gloomy plots, Spartan is a perfect relic of the War on Terror. Kilmer plays Master Gunnery Sergeant Robert John Scott, a special forces operator that now assesses Delta Force candidates. The Presidentâs daughter has gone missing and heâs called back into action. If those two sentences make your eyes roll in preparation for a Nelson DeMille/Tom Clancy gadget-and-acronym-fest, I hear you. But in the hands of David Mamet, Americaâs deacon of dialogue-as-combat, the movie’s scrim of plot threads and ghostly set pieces becomes gauzy and strange and nearly avant-garde.
A sex-trafficking ring becomes a red herring. Kilmerâs protégé is killed by a sniper in a genuinely startling scene. When Kilmer finally finds the presidentâs daughter, played by Kristen Bell, and the first daughter lights up in a safe house, Kilmer calmly approaches her and tells her that she needs to drop the cig. Trained operatives can smell American tobacco, even from across a desert. Itâs a third confession, a third seduction and a third mentorship. Kilmerâs voice never rises above calm authority, even when delivering quintessentially Mamet lines like, âThey don’t go through the door, we don’t ask why. That’s not a cost, it’s a benefit. Because we get to travel light. They tell me where to go. Tell me what to do when I get there.â Kilmer harnesses the movie and all of its splendidly messy hems to craft a portrait of the giga-competent government operative in the Bush-Cheney era: existentially alone, effortlessly violent, and divinely accepting of how the silo of his craft gives him reason to live. Kilmer plays Scott with a laconic ease that maybe only Robert Mitchum could have matched.
Kilmer and Mamet feuded on-set because of course they did. On the Spartan DVD commentary, Kilmer unloads on Mamet, claiming that, âHe hates actors, having failed at the profession himself.â Mamet cast his own rabbi in Spartan and made Kilmerâs character shoot him. In boxing, they say that styles make fights. I can tell you that I would empty my accounts to have seen Mamet-Kilmer from the front row. And yet in Mametâs 2023 Hollywood memoir Everywhere an Oink Oink, Mamet looks back on the making of Spartan fondly, remembering chilling in Valâs trailer, âat wrap, at dawn, beyond fatigue, drinking Bloody Marys, half vodka, half V8, and half horseradish, while he explained the Commerce Clause.â Spartan feels like the kind of movie whose eventual Criterion release will become a feast day, and the irresistible force of Kilmer meeting the immovable object of Mamet pitches the weirdness and intensity to 11.
Hollywood has always sanded down the authentically non-compliant. According to many reports, Kilmer could be difficult, whatever that label means. He walked away from jobs he didnât want. He wrote poetry and served as Bacchus in New Orleans in 2009. He took the position seriously. He visited hospitalized kids, loved all and looked absolutely dope in white. Iâm older now than when Batman Forever tweaked my preadolescence and older than when Spartan dumped me on my head during my college years. Iâm less interested in half-baked definitions of legacy. Or maybe Iâm just less interested in how Val Kilmerâs will be legislated. He was great in everything he was in, effortlessly warping potential clichés into art and turning potential trash into the enigmatic. Pick any of his films. Watch Val Kilmer move through scenes like an extraordinary wild animal or a fleeting desert wind. Thatâs not stardom. Thatâs soul.