The 2010 movie Val Kilmer adored for being awful: “I’m proud of how bad this film is”
The longer his career wore on, the more likely Val Kilmer was to make a terrible movie, which is mostly because so many of his later credits were straight-to-video genre films that hardly anyone saw.
On the plus side, his big-screen swansong was one of his best efforts, and while his screentime in Top Gun: Maverick was admittedly minimal, the actor bowing out with both the highest-grossing picture he’d ever been in and the single most emotional scene in his filmography was a near-perfect final note.
Of course, Kilmer does have a posthumous picture on the way, but seeing as he’s been dead since April 2025, and writer and director Coerte Voorhees’ As Deep as the Night is using an entirely AI-generated version of the late star to play a supporting role in the film, anyone with any respect for cinema won’t count it.
Maverick apart, though, the last two decades of Kilmer’s working life were hardly overflowing with greatness. Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang are excellent, and Palo Alto has its fans, but that’s about it, and it says a lot about where he was that Conspiracy director Adam Marcus called the wayward actor the worst human being that he’d ever met.
Most former stars who slum it on the bargain-bin circuit try to keep their heads down and keep the money rolling in, but not Kilmer. In fact, one of his widely panned flops that took a critical beating became a badge of honour. That said, the film does have its supporters, the most notable being one of the biggest and most successful directors in the industry.
“I’m proud of how bad this film is,” Kilmer said shortly after the release of 2010’s MacGruber, the feature-length Saturday Night Live spinoff starring Will Forte and Kristen Wiig that cast him as the villainous Dieter Von Cunth. “In fact, I can’t believe I just called it a film. It’s a two-hour skit.”
He might have been proud of how terrible the action comedy spoof was, but he clearly had his limits, seeing as The Doors figurehead flat-out refused to shoot a scene that would have seen his penis cut off and shoved in his mouth, although he was happy to be blown up, immolated, and pissed on from a great height instead.
Now, while it’s true that MacGruber wasn’t a critical darling, and it’s also true that even the modestly budgeted $10 million film failed to recoup those costs at the box office, not everyone would agree with Kilmer and say that it’s an actively awful motion picture, having developed a sizeable cult following over the last decade and a half.
What’s also true is that it doesn’t have a single more famous fan than Christopher Nolan, who absolutely adores the movie and, according to Anne Hathaway, has been known to quote it on set. Kilmer was proud of how bad it was, but Nolan would disagree, because he thinks it’s a comedic masterpiece.
