What do “Top Gun,” “Tombstone” and “The Doors” all have in common? They all star Val Kilmer.
Kilmer started his acting career in stage theatre before landing the lead role in 1984’s “Top Secret!”. From there, he featured in a plethora of films throughout the 80s and 90s, becoming a big-name actor in high demand.
Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2015, but after treatments quickly returned to acting in 2017. Kilmer’s final feature in a film was the reprisal of his role as Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky in 2022’s “Top Gun: Maverick”. He died on April 1 after a battle with pneumonia.
Despite his death, there is a lot from his career Kilmer will be remembered for. He is well known for his humanitarian work, his tremendous skill as an actor, as the voice of Moses in “The Prince of Egypt” or, most frequently, for playing the antagonist against Tom Cruise in the 1986 film “Top Gun.”
In honor of his career, I have chosen to rewatch Kilmer in one of his lesser-known roles, that of senior college student Chris Knight in “Real Genius,” and review the film.
Released in 1985, “Real Genius” follows the story of fifteen year-old Mitch Taylor (Gabriel Jarret) as he is paired with Knight (Val Kilmer) by antagonistic professor Jerry Hathaway (William Atherton) to design a chemical laser capable of reaching high levels of power without imploding.
In the opening scenes of the film, it is revealed that Hathaway, professor of the fictional university Pacific Tech, has been covertly hired by the CIA to develop a power source for a weapon intended to execute political assassinations from space without detection. This is a reference to Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, also called his Star Wars program and, among other things, was designed to use lasers stationed in space to protect the United States from intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Because Mitch and Chris have been designated to design the weapon under false pretenses, discovering the nature of what they are doing should be the central source of conflict in the film and influence the majority of the plot’s direction. However, this is not the case.
In a film with a 1 hour, 48-minute runtime, the main characters do not discover the reality of the task they have been assigned until 1 hour, 17 minutes in, and neither of the leads are the ones to come to this realization. Instead, the epiphany comes from former student Lazlo Hollyfeld in the middle of a seedy burger restaurant, something that is particularly ridiculous when one takes into consideration that self-described cynic Chris Knight did not once throughout the movie become skeptical of why Hathaway wanted him to design a laser in the first place, except maybe to operate as a thorn in his side.
After its completion, and despite a curveball thrown their way which they easily overcome, Mitch and Chris thwart the government’s plans to use the laser for assassinations. This added plot element serves no purpose other than to add last-minute tension in an extremely low-stakes movie.
The initial set-up for the government creating covert assassination armament is so far from the payoff that the viewer almost forgets it is even supposed to be a major plot point. It feels as if these events are not as serious because so much of the runtime is dedicated to the main characters just hanging out and goofing around. While there is a decent amount of emphasis on the severely lacking emotional development of the characters, it should not be more central to the movie than the creation of the laser.
Even other, smaller conflicts in the film are glossed over in comparison. Kent destroying the initial design of the laser, Mitch briefly wanting to quit and Chris nearly flunking out of college are all scenarios that barely register as concerns because they are all resolved so quickly. Ultimately, they just feel like a waste of time, as they do not give the characters much motivation to overcome Hathaway’s affronted disposition and prove his doubts about their competence wrong.
The conclusion of the film itself feels underwhelming–the gang uses their laser to pop an exorbitant amount of popcorn in Hathaway’s house, thus destroying it. Instead of being apoplectic, Hathaway just stands and stares, and the movie ends with the characters standing around outside as Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” plays, which is somehow the most 80s thing to occur in this entire movie.
The viewer may assume that in a film with so little runtime dedicated to the central event of the plot, the focus on the characters would make up for it, but they would be wrong.
The truth is, Mitch Taylor is a precocious child prodigy who suffers from having overprotective, yet scientifically ignorant parents whom he struggles to connect with. It is evident that he is looked down upon by most people his age and lacks any significant relationships with his peers. Consequently, he turns to outside sources and authority figures for validation in his endeavors and highly values his own academic success, which should be a cause for conflict but is not.
Conversely, the character of Chris Knight is the complete opposite. He has the intelligence to easily succeed in college, yet he is completely unconcerned with doing so. He avoids responsibility like the plague, preferring to spend his senior year of college skipping class, wreaking havoc on the other students in his dorm and deflecting others’ attempts at interacting with a deadpan, droll sense of humor.
Now, one may be wondering just how two leads with such a juxtaposition between themselves can manage to form a friendship within the first 30 minutes of the. Luckily, the answer to that question is never given, as the development of a real emotional bond between Knight and Taylor is traded for a montage of them working on the production of the laser together. Instead of dedicating any screen time to exploring how the characters were able to overcome their differences in personality and work together so successfully, the film cheaply forms a full-fledged friendship with no explanation of how they got there.
There are a couple of wrenches thrown in the works in regards to Mitch and Chris’s friendship, the most major being a pool party Chris throws to prove to Mitch that he does not need to be so serious about everything. The ensuing fraternity shenanigans, at a pool party in which half the attendees are student beauticians, serve no purpose other than being as gratuitous as possible while still maintaining a PG rating.
Things go amiss when Hathaway discovers Chris and Mitch are at the party and not working on the laser. While Mitch is deeply upset by a man he looked up to deriding him in front of other people, he stays mad at Chris for inciting this incident for all of two seconds before the argument is quickly resolved, leaving the viewer to question the purpose of this interjection in the movie’s overall plot.
Chris and Mitch are not the only characters who fail to receive the proper attention to become fully fleshed-out, however.
The character of Jerry Hathaway, although functioning as a perfectly passable antagonist, lacks any real motivation behind his actions other than needing to create a laser for the government finding children annoying. He is just another stuck-up, egotistical authority figure with extremely specific grudges in a long line of similar 1980s film antagonists, such as Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Richard Vernon in The Breakfast Club. Though he should be an excellent source of conflict for the movie, Chris almost never allows him to be.
Chris deflects nearly every chance he is given at showing he is capable of being articulate and conscientious by speaking in endless lines of jokes, which creates rather underwhelming interactions between him and Jerry. The audience becomes so used to Chris’s propensity for frivolousness that when he is shown to be capable of handling issues like an adult during later scenes, such as the pool party quarrel, the events end up holding very little weight with the audience and heart-to-hearts end up feeling useless.
Through all that, Kilmer does the best job he can playing a half-baked jokester character with a less than impressive script, even if the biggest laughs of the film do not come from him. The majority of his comedic lines are the most memorable in the whole film, and when he is allowed moments of intensity, he runs to the hills with them and pulls them off without going over the edge. However, he was funnier in “Top Secret!”
