BEFORE: Back from our trip upstate, we hit a giant outdoor flea market and a diner on the way back to Queens, and we still had 2 1/2 days left in a holiday weekend - all part of the plan. I had to work on clearing 2 DVRs today so they won't fill up, but I also didn't want to lose my momentum with movies. I pity the film that has to follow "The Avengers" though. Linking from that film, Robert Downey Jr. was also in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" with Val Kilmer (last seen in "The Ghost and the Darkness").
THE PLOT: Simon Templar, also known as The Saint, is hired by the Russian Mafia to steal a cold fusion energy formula from a scientist.
AFTER: In another nice bit of coincidence, the plots of both "The Avengers" and this film concern the development of unlimited energy sources - here it's not a tesseract, but the concept of cold fusion. In the film cold fusion is a theoretical possibility, but one which can't be supported by any repeatable experiments - which is essentially where the concept is in the real world as well, though many also regard it as a form of "junk science", like perpetual motion.
But we're here to talk about The Saint, who's sort of a low-rent James Bond in many ways. He's more like Remington Steele, a man with a shrouded past (though some is revealed here in a flashback) who goes under an assumed name (here it's always a variation on the name of one or two Catholic saints) and is famous for his narrow escapes. Here he's also a master of disguise, but for the audience's sake, all of his disguises end up looking like Val Kilmer wearing fake teeth or a wig. There's none of that "false face" stuff that gets overused in films like "Mission: Impossible".
There is an acting challenge here, but it's not in the look, it's in the voice. It may be an actor's dream to play a character whose disguises involve realistic accents - it's one more thing he uses to throw people off, sounding at different times like an Australian, Russian or German. To me, that's more work than putting on make-up or a wig.
Templar pulls a heist off some Russians, then uses this as leverage somehow to get hired by his victims (nope, can't see any way THAT can possibly go south) to steal the cold fusion formula from a scientist, who turns out to be an attractive woman he can seduce. You know, because all female nuclear scientists are smoking hot, in addition to being brainy. And because all important nuclear secrets can be written on a couple of post-its, not in a thick journal or on a hard-drive. Seriously?
Like "The Shadow" was to comic-book films, and like "Cutthroat Island" was to pirate films, this film seemed to be hamstrung by being released just a few years too early. A couple years later, "Mission: Impossible" was released, and then the Bourne saga - so spy films and mysterious secret agent films were about to go big, and I believe this one fizzled. False start. Maybe it was just a bit too far-fetched, and hadn't hit upon the secret yet. There are no car chases to speak of here, for example, and the stunts didn't quite go far enough to dazzle.
NITPICK POINT: The people who work at airports, or for the police, who are experts in facial recognition should have seen right through Templar's shoddy disguises. They're trained to look for things that don't change, like earlobe shapes and cheekbones, or how far apart someone's eyes are. Changing the length of your hair, or putting on a phony moustache just ain't gonna cut it.
NITPICK POINT #2: So, in the fictional spy world, does cold fusion work or not? I found the film's ending to be confusing - the formula's only valuable if it works, but the notes were found to be incomplete, but then someone said they're not incomplete, they're just in the wrong order. Which is it? The scientist is still looking for funding, so to me that suggests that it doesn't work yet. So how come the paperwork is so valuable?
Also starring Elisabeth Shue (last seen in "Hollow Man"), with cameos from Emily Mortimer (last seen in "Elizabeth") and the voice of Roger Moore (last heard in "Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore").
RATING: 5 out of 10 lock-picks
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