The Saint: Critic Reviews

Loud, frantic, ridiculously overproduced and featuring a preening performance by Val Kilmer as a supposedly brilliant master of disguise, The Saint is sheer overkill.

Anyone looking for a religious experience at the multiplex this weekend will do better checking out Dennis Rodman's hair hues in Double Team.

Reinvention in the hands of Hollywood is seldom cause for celebration.

[Noyce] keeps things moving at a kinetic, involving pace.

The Saint is all glitz and comic-book spy plot with no more than a passing hint that Templar has a real personality behind the disguises.

Compared with the sensational stunts and special effects in the Bond series, The Saint seems positively leisurely.

This insufferable romance-adventure includes vague comedy as well as unintentional humor, and its target audience seems to be preadolescents who won't notice the calculated enthusiasm with which it sidesteps sexuality.

A piece of mass-market movie bubblegum that stretches incredulity and then snaps apart.

A generic suspenser that doesn't taste bad at first bite but becomes increasingly hard to swallow.

More entertaining than Mission: Impossible or the last Bond film, Goldeneye, it brings back the humour and sang-froid that makes the genre work.

A soulless piece of claptrap.

The Saint is lightly entertaining, but there's very little here worth getting excited about.

Love redeems this profiteer; it also renders him conventional.

Whereas something like Clear and Present Danger was briskly all of a piece, "The Saint" has difficulty making us believe that its diverse elements belong in the same motion picture.

Kilmer slips in and out of a series of ludicrously elaborate disguises, some more convincing than others, while poor Shue shuffles through the role of a sexy, book-reading babe pretending to be a dowdy lady scientist in kneesocks.

The glossy photography is stunning and Kilmer's implausible accents are fun.

There's no lack of style or pace from Noyce, just the sense that it isn't quite gelling together.

There was enough in the movie for me to watch and somewhat enjoy it the whole way through.

Eminently forgettable.

What could have been a cool concept movie buckles under an uninspired script and some treacherous miscasting.

Kilmer should have stuck with his Batman character.

Nothing in the film really makes any sense, and all the other characters seem buffoonish and arch, overplayed to the point of farce, more Matt Helm than James Bond.

The film works, thanks to Noyce's skill in creating suspense and staging elaborate action scenes.

The predictable action-thriller elements are all in place, from coke-sniffing, machine-gun-toting thugs to monotonous narrow escapes. The look is stylish, sound is above average, and the acting only as good as it has to be.

This film ought to make tons of money.