'The Saint' movie review
(C) 1997 Paramount Pictures Director Phillip Noyce’s 1997 suspense thriller “The Saint” is an entertaining but convoluted movie based on Leslie Charteris’ long-running book series and various radio, movie, and television spin-offs about a suave, Robin Hood-like criminal named Simon Templar. Starring Val Kilmer, Elisabeth Shue, Rade Serbedzija, and Valery Nikolaev, “The Saint” pits the mysterious thief/master of disguises (Kilmer) against an ex-Soviet Communist Party boss/oil oligarch (Serbedzija) who wants to rebuild the former Soviet Union - with himself as absolute ruler. Screenwriters Jonathan Hensleigh and Wesley Strick begin this James Bond-like tale with The Saint’s origin story. In a prologue set in a nebulous “Yesterday,” a young boy named John Rossi lives in a hellish orphanage somewhere in the Far East. After the ruthless headmaster punishes the orphans by storing all the food in a locked pantry, John - who calls himself Simon Templar after a ...