The Saint (1997)

The 1997 adaptation of Leslie Charteris's durable thief arrives with a curious distinction: it is a Hollywood action picture that has almost entirely declined to participate in the cultural conversation of its own era, let alone ours. Val Kilmer plays Simon Templar, a master of disguise who cycles through a dozen accents and wigs in service of stealing a cold fusion formula from an Oxford electrochemist. The film wants charm, momentum, and a leading man's vanity project, and it pursues those aims with a single-mindedness that leaves little room for messaging of any kind.

Where the picture does brush against contemporary sensibilities, it does so incidentally. Elisabeth Shue's Emma Russell is a genuinely capable scientist who completes the formula herself, but the screenplay treats her as a romantic objective to be won, seduced, and recovered, which is a 1930s posture wearing a 1990s jacket. The plot's energy crisis, an oil shortage engineered by a billionaire oligarch hoarding heating fuel beneath his mansion, gestures toward resource politics without ever arguing a position. The villain is a former Communist boss turned capitalist predator, and the hero ends the film by quietly routing three billion dollars to the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and UNICEF. This is genre philanthropy, the tidy moral arithmetic of a caper, not a critique of anything.

The remainder of the ledger is empty. There is no engagement with racial identity, no queer subtext, no interest in body image, neurodivergence, or the rewriting of history. The film's one ethical flourish, a hero who refuses to kill, plays as a personality quirk instead of a sermon. It is, in the end, a relic of a moment when blockbusters wanted only to be liked.