Entering directors Leo Scott and Ting Poo‘s “Val,” one is best suited not knowing what has happened to actor Val Kilmer. When Kilmer’s sheer physical deterioration was revealed on-screen, the audience at the DeBussy theatre gasped. I knew about it due to the excellent 2020 NYT piece “What Happened to Val Kilmer?” which laid out the actor’s brutal bout with lung cancer and the chemotherapy that destroyed his ability to speak — to the point where a tracheotomy has forced him to press on a hole in his jugular to let out a screechy babble of worded sentences.
Coincidentally, the thick of the footage in “Val” is Kilmer’s own. The actor had a camera on-hand at almost every crucial turning point in his life, from his Julliard days in the early ‘80s to his cancer diagnosis in the late Aughts. It makes for a well-edited affair, but one that feels more like a standard biopic, despite the initimacy of the footage. There isn’t necessarily anything raw or risky about the story — unless you find behind the scenes footage of Kilmer at Julliard and on the set of “ Top Gun” enticing.
The narration, voiced by son Jack Kilmer, was written by the actor himself. They definitely sound alike. Kilmer amassed thousands of hours of footage, from 16mm home movies made with his brothers with Poo and Scott spending over nine months digitizing Kilmer’s footage. The result is watchable but not as earth shattering as it should be.
Some of the footage is stunning — from Kilmer, Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon hanging out backstage at Julliard to the on-set chaos that happened between Marlon Brando and John Frankheimer behind the scenes of “The Island of Dr. Moreau.” There’s more than enough here to whet our cinephile appetites. However, one would have liked to have seen Poo/Scott concentrate more on latter-day Kilmer, where he struggles with cancer and the loss of voice, and less on his early days as a hungry young actor. Alas, this plays more like a bio-doc, a recap of a career rather than the story of whatever the hell happened to Val Kilmer.