Val Kilmer died on Tuesday. He had been diagnosed with throat cancer years ago, and early reports are that he died after a bout with pneumonia. Too beautiful to be a character actor and too much of a weirdo to be the Hollywood leading man his beauty seemed destined for, Kilmer was nonetheless one of the greats. He saw himself as an artist, in all the messy and pretentious ways that term implies. But no matter what, you couldn't look away from him. He's been in a lot of great movies, and some bad ones too. In his honor, here are five movies I think best exemplify what made him such an exceptional star.
Tombstone (1993) Dir. George Cosmatos - "Doc Holliday"
Tombstone is probably Kilmer's best performance. His portrayal of the legendary dentist-turned-outlaw riddled with tuberculosis is the best one ever (sorry, Dennis Quaid). It's over the top in the right ways, debonair, dastardly, and so very magnetic. It is a testament to the man's beauty and charisma that he can make a sweaty, hack-coughing, gray-skinned man look so cool. As something of an inversion of his bigger roles in Top Gun and The Saint, in Tombstone Kilmer uses his matinee-idol looks in a way that balances out what could be a hard character to live with.
His specifically Georgian accent and Southern dandy mannerisms counterpoise the archetypically rigid, lawmen performances of Kurt Russell, Sam Elliott, and Bill Paxton. And his stare-downs and gun-measuring contests with Michael Biehn are just electric. Tombstone is a flawed history lesson that rollercoasters between thrilling and goofy, but Kilmer is fantastic throughout.
Heat (1995) Dir. Michael Mann - "Chris Shiherlis"
Some of Kilmer's best performances came when he was a side character, like his roles in True Romance, Deja Vu, and even Kill The Irishman, where he elevates generic mob-movie garbage. His finest supporting work though came in Michael Mann's Heat—one of the best films of all time, featuring career-best work from Mann, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro—where Kilmer more than holds his own as Chris Shiherlis. A gambling junkie but a dynamite thief, Chris is the top lieutenant for De Niro's Neil McCauley's heisting crew, bad husband to Ashley Judd, and an absolute fool with that tool.
Because this is a Michael Mann movie, Kilmer has to communicate a lot with only the subtlest of glances and gestures. In total, he gets barely 30 minutes of screen time and not very many lines, and though the iconic "the action is the juice" quote doesn't belong to him, his "the bank is worth the risk" is just as memorable—as is him asking a bunch of street-ball players where he can get bread at 1 a.m. to avoid being spotted by the cops. If Heat 2 happens, the movie would follow the before and after of Shiherlis, a much deserved though delayed tribute to his contribution in this film.
The Doors (1991) Dir. Oliver Stone - "Jim Morrison"
But sometimes, a great actor has to go bonkers. How to even begin to describe Oliver Stone's biopic of rock and roll superstar Jim Morrison and his band The Doors? It's a testament to rockstar myth-making, a love letter to sex, drugs, and rock music, an appropriately excessive monument to excess, a bloated hagiography of a gossip columnist's fantasy of Morrison and the '60s, a nightmarish vision of Vietnam War–era pop culture and desperate escapism. It's weird, it's crass, it's highly improbable, it's magnetic, it's a stupid movie about the fantasy of a band, and yet every time I watch a biopic nowadays, I'm often left wishing someone else could make another movie just like The Doors.
Kilmer locates Morrison somewhere between Jesus Christ and a drunken buffoon, and sometimes both at once. More than merely chewing the scenery, Kilmer is binge eating, and it is glorious. Kilmer tended to bring a bigness and strangeness to his performances, even to the point of it being off-putting, as evidenced by his audition tape for Full Metal Jacket. But the upside was that he could go so big at times that it felt spiritually transcendent, like it does in some of the sequences in this movie. This impulse doesn't necessarily help when you're playing Batman, but that's how these things go sometimes. There will and can never be anything like The Doors again, and movies are worse off for it.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) Dir. Shane Black - "Perry van Shrike"
Shane Black is a little like action-movie Aaron Sorkin, in the sense that his movies work best when the actors capture the rhythm of his writing. For his directorial debut, he helped to boost up both Robert Downey Jr. and Kilmer, who had been on a bit of a cold streak. It proved an inspired casting choice, because not only did the two of them have great chemistry, but they perfectly encapsulated the fast-talking, crime-novel rhythm that Black had always been going for and could finally perfect. A rat-a-tat feat of dark comic genius only to be rivaled by Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in The Nice Guys.
Kilmer's Perry van Shrike is a walking trope of the hard-bitten film noir private eye, the foil to Downey's slick-talking crook Harry Lockhart. The "twist," if you want to call it that, is that Perry is a gay man, which, because it's 2005, gets used for comedic fodder throughout the movie. It's some of Kilmer's funniest stuff, similar in some ways to his work opposite Nicholas Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. But here, it's much more charming in its violence and send-up of the film noir genre.
MacGruber (2010) Dir. Jorma Taccone - "Dieter Von Cunth"
A dumb comedy can tell you a lot about a great actor. Sometimes, it tells you how behind they are on their mortgage for their vacation home. Other times, it tells you about their process. Kilmer takes this obviously ridiculous movie very seriously, but in a way where you can tell he understands the ridiculousness. Kilmer makes Von Cunth diabolical and hilarious without ever really trying to be "funny" in any real way.
He really comes across as getting a kick out of the whole thing. Kilmer was hilarious in many movies, but he rarely ever got to be in things that were just silly and playful. MacGruber was such a box-office failure that there was no chance he'd get to do it again, but it'll be a cult classic in my house and I love him for being in it. I love him for all of these movies, forever.
