The Saint

Mission: Impossible apparently has set the pattern for adapting a slick '60s TV series high on the skullduggery: visual pizzazz, narrative incoherence, and an egocentric star. Based on the Leslie Charteris novels by way of the '30s movies starring George Sanders, the TV show featured a blithe Roger Moore as Simon Templar, a modern-day Robin Hood engaged in implausible, cheeky high jinks, righting wrongs and making a little larcenous profit on the side. In Philip Noyce's new version, Templar's levity is overwhelmed by technical bravura, a Vertigo-like backstory, Val Kilmer's exhausting histrionics, and a dour and lumpy plot about decadent neo-capitalism in Russia and a formula for cold fusion. The latter is provided by a miscast Elizabeth Shue as brilliant scientist Emma Russell, who's targeted by Templar in the pay of a wanna-be Russian tsar. But mostly this is an opportunity for Kilmer to ham it up in a variety of disguises and accents. At the Harbour Mall, Narragansett, Showcase, Starcase, Westerly and Woonsocket cinemas.

-- Peter Keough