The Saint (1997)
Directed by Phillip Noyce
Simon Templar (The Saint), is a thief for hire, whose latest job to steal the secret process for cold fusion puts him at odds with a traitor bent on toppling the Russian government, as well as the woman who holds its secret.
4 connections found
View:
4 connections, in both directions
What critics compared The Saint to
The minions first arrive in New York, but while flipping channels on a department-store TV—The Saint, Bewitched, The Dating Game—they stumble across a secret channel announcing the upcoming Villain-Con convention to be held in Orlando.
No, it’s not Get Smart , I Spy , The Avengers , The Saint , or The Wild Wild West .
The film, which was written for a man, baby, was scripted by Kurt Wimmer (“Law Abiding Citizen,” “Ultraviolet”) and directed by Phillip Noyce, whose previous credits run the gamut from the sublime (“Clear and Present Danger,” “Rabbit-Proof Fence”) to the not-so (“The Bone Collector,” “The Saint”).
Director Phillip Noyce is on familiar ground here (he directed the Harrison Ford-led Tom Clancy movies and “The Saint”), and while he does a perfectly competent job, his directing style doesn’t have any more personality than the characters.
(To better imagine these flashbacks, think of the opening scene from Noyce’s “The Saint” spread out over an entire film.)
The man who had made such iconic Australian films as Backroads (1977), Newsfront and Heatwave (1982), would eventually work with 'stars' like Harrison Ford, Denzel Washington, Sharon Stone and Val Kilmer to make a range of action-thriller genre flicks (Patriot Games [1992], Sliver [1993], The Saint [1997], The Bone Collector [1999] to name a few).
Noyce, whose work to date has more often focused on action/adventure (The Saint, Clear and Present Danger) has made a film of enormous emotional impact and subtlety, something I would not have expected.
But Noyce, who’s become so accustomed to operating on the dumb-and-dumber Hollywood mindset of The Saint and Clear and Present Danger, directs Rabbit-Proof Fence with the precision of an amateur heart surgeon working with a butter knife.
Otherwise, it was a gilded slide into the abyss with "Sliver," "The Saint" and his last major-studio outing, "The Bone Collector," in which Denzel Washington played a homicide detective who was also a quadriplegic principally, or so it appeared, so he couldn't get his hands on co-star Angelina Jolie.
Noyce's la-la land output has varied from the accomplished (1997's "The Saint," 1992's "Patriot Games") to the truly awful (1999's "The Bone Collector"), but nothing he's done has captured the attention of the film world like his breakthrough 1989 thriller, "Dead Calm."