The Val Kilmer movie Roger Ebert hated: “It lacks the charm of being so bad it’s funny”
When Val Kilmer emerged in the 1980s, he quickly picked up credits in some incredibly popular films, most notably Top Gun, the hit Tom Cruise vehicle that became the highest-grossing movie of 1986. With other credits in movies like Willow and, of course, The Doors – in which Kilmer played the enigmatic frontman Jim Morrison – the actor became one of the most well-known faces of his generation.
However, as he began taking on more and more roles into the 1990s, from Tombstone and True Romance to Batman Forever and Heat, some critically panned stinkers also slipped through the net, like The Island of Dr Moreau and The Ghost and the Darkness. It seemed that 1996 wasn’t the greatest year for Kilmer, which is a shame considering he’d appeared in Heat the year before. It’s often the case that an actor will simply have an off-year, although that won’t stop the criticism from rolling in.
The Ghost and the Darkness, directed by Stephen Hopkins, did manage to scoop up an Academy Award for ‘Best Sound Editing’, but that was all. Critics were much less receptive to literally every other part of the film, and Kilmer even earned a Razzie nomination. Clearly, you can’t have it all. Roger Ebert, the legendary film critic, was particularly unimpressed by the film, giving it half a star out of four.
He started his review by saying that it “makes the Tarzan movies look subtle and realistic. It lacks even the usual charm of being so bad it’s funny. It’s just bad.”
Criticising Kilmer’s character for having a “trim modern haircut that never grows an inch during his weeks in the bush,” he continued his written attack of the film by saying of Michael Douglas’ character, “If this were a comic strip, there would be flies buzzing around his head.”
The movie is set in the late 1800s, with Tom Wilkinson’s character enlisting Kilmer’s engineer, John Henry Patterson, to help him finish building a railroad in Africa. However, when it becomes apparent that there are vicious man-eating lions nearby, Douglas’ Charles Remington arrives to try and save the day. While the film grossed $87million against its $55m budget, it was largely criticised for being rather poorly directed and acted, existing as nothing more than a pretty forgettable adventure movie.
Ebert continued his tirade by writing, “Many scenes are so inept as to beggar description. Some of the lion attacks seem to have been staged by telling the actors to scream while a lion rug was waved in front of the camera.”
The critic continued, “A competent editor would have known that all this shifting back and forth would become distracting.”
He felt as though the actors looked out of place, which is not far-fetched criticism. “In the old days this movie would have starred Stewart Granger and Trevor Howard, and they would have known it was bad but they would have seemed at home in it, cleaning their rifles and chugging their gin like seasoned bwanas. Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas never for a second look like anything other than thoroughly unhappy movie stars stuck in a humid climate and a doomed production.”
