Where's Val-do?

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Val Kilmer is stylin' international thief Simon Templar in "The Saint."

Strictly speaking, the Saint is not a spy but an international thief who, as a result of an unhappy childhood in a Catholic orphanage, is in the habit of naming his various alter egos after Catholic saints. As the movie opens, the Saint, who's real name t urns out to be Simon Templar, is in Moscow stealing a top-secret microchip. His endeavors make unwilling business partners out of oil tycoon and Nationalist presidential candidate Ivan Tretiak (played by Rade Serbezija from "Before the Rain") and his Mafi oso son Ilya (Valery Nikolaev). The cold Russian winter has brought with it a major energy crisis, and Tretiak hopes to upset the current president by introducing a new source of fuel. For this reason he commissions the Saint to steal the scientific formu las of Dr. Emma Russel (Elisabeth Shue), a physicist who may have invented a functioning version of cold fusion. She, of course, turns out to be a fox, with her formulas written on note cards she keeps in her bra. As the Saint sets out to seduce her, he f inds himself falling in love. Will he choose the path of the sinner or the path of the saint in the end?

You guessed it! But despite the familiar story line, the film surprises us with its clever twists and turns. Although the Saint possesses the usual outrageous luck of a secret-agent man, these events form a logical, complex chain of events. The movie asks us to suspend our disbelief, but it doesn't ask us to switch off our brain. A complement to the film's rapid-fire pace is Val Kilmer's often amusing character acting. Sometimes he succeeds, as with his gay German character, and other times it's funny to see him fail. The foreign actors outshine the Americans, and one of the film's main assets is its Moscow location. Aerial views and generous crane shots give us a full picture of the historic city during winter, and Red Square serves as a background in se veral scenes. The political setting of "The Saint" helps it feel fresh by involving Russian nationalist politics and organized crime.

That's important, since the Saint character dates back to a series of novels written by Leslie Charteris in the 1920s. During the past 70 years this immortal figure has appeared in radio shows, B-films, comic books and several television series. Roger Moo re played the master criminal in a 1960 television series, where he drove around in a white Volvo sports coup with the Saint's stick-figure-with-a-halo symbol on the hood. The new Saint is a little tougher and a little darker. He survives in this movie, j ust as he has survived the past 70-some years. Most likely we'll see him again - that's the way it is with immortals.