The Saint
dir. Philip Noyce
Paramount Pictures

If you don’t count the Star Trek sequels and animated escapades like The Jetsons and DuckTales, the movies based on television series in the ‘80s could be counted on one hand — Strange Brew in 1983, The Untouchables in 1987, The Naked Gun in 1988 and Tales from the Darkside in 1990. (If you prefer to define the decade ’80-’89, drop Darkside and tack on The Nude Bomb, based on Get Smart!, and The Blues Brothers.)

This decade, however, it’s a different story — counting by the same criteria, there are roughly three dozen, as well as a much greater proliferation of from-TV animated features. Throw sequels in as well and you’re fast approaching 60 movies. And of the original 30-odd films, very few — Twin Peaks, Mystery Science Theater 3000, The X-Files, the debut of the Next Generation on Star Trek and a handful of contemporaneous “Saturday Night Live” adaptations — are from on-air-at-the-time series.

The rest all hearken back to, at the earliest, the ’70s, which is the bizarre key to their box office success — they have the cachet of fondly remembered bodies of work, whether straight (The Fugitive) or as kitsch (The Brady Bunch), but their movie adaptations are rarely faithful at all to their source material. The small-screen spy theatrics of Jim Phelps and crew had exceedingly little to do with either Mission: Impossible adaptation, even though both succeeded on their own right.

The failures are easily found, however, and everyone has their favorite, by which of course they mean “least favorite”: the Jay Ward trilogy (George of the Jungle, Dudley Do-Right, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle), dead revisitations of unfunny sitcoms (The Beverly Hillbillies, McHale’s Navy, Car 54 Where are You?), SNL disasters (It’s Pat, A Night at the Roxbury, Superstar) ...

The most heinous subcategory, however, is outright terrible adaptations of beloved, semi-serious source material, and in this race it’s too close to call between The Saint and The Avengers. Sure, The Avengers is considerably worse, but expectations were cellar-low coming in — the cast (Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman, Sean Connery) was strong, but it was immediately obvious that this was an out-of-control production without a script and an undistinguished director expected to rein it in.

The Saint, though ... The Saint was the heartbreaker. Helmed by Philip Noyce (Dead Calm, Patriot Games), an action stylist capable of brilliance, and featuring a cast that could at the least be considered reliable — Val Kilmer had just been great in Heat and Elisabeth Shue has just won her Leaving Las Vegas Oscar — The Saint could have rivaled Mission: Impossible for action franchise of the decade. It even had the eccentric touches — Kilmer’s spy’s well-realized history, the Post-It note fixation of Shue’s scientist character — that would suggest a potentially sublime result.

But: No. As Simon Templar, Kilmer had all the silly accents and fop disguises, but no sense of fun underpinning it. A passable plotline about renewable energy sources and post-Soviet Russia devolves into Templar asking, “How long do you need to finish the cold fusion formula?” and Shue’s scientist calling back, “Twenty minutes!” And would a single, decent, action-oriented setpiece or cool spy gadgetry be too much to ask?

The movie didn’t even really make sense when strung together, even if it would take Shue 20 minutes to crack cold fusion. The post-production force-fit of too many styles at the expense of too much intelligence was the smoking gun. And by targeting an audience that had never even heard of the TV series that the movie spent its whole duration ignoring, The Saint self-extracted its raison d’etre, resulting in an all-out implosion that went nowhere faster than a Möbius strip.

Of course, compared to The Avengers, it’s genius, but that’s cold comfort.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)