Val: Amazon Prime Video Review

Director: Leo Scott and Ting Poo

Iceman, Batman, Mark Twain, Jim Morrison - Val Kilmer's been them all.

But he's emphatically himself in this haunting portrait of a star that always seemed to be lost in his screen quest and as he negotiated the Hollywood machine, being labelled difficult to work with and dealing with his legacy with the fans.

As Kilmer lost his voice to throat cancer in 2015, he lost the ability to act and express himself, but as directors Leo Scott and Ting Poo discovered he never fully lost himself with decades' worth of home video footage to trawl through and with which to construct  a story.

So robbed of his actual voice outside of a scratching painful noise from his throat, Poo and Scott employ Kilmer's son Jack to voice over the documentary, something which is revealed early on.

But it doesn't remove the genuine shock when Kilmer himself utters his first words as song Everybody's Talkin plays gently in the background. "It's like I've lived my life and it's sort of in all of these boxes, but what is the part of the profound sadness is Iknow it's incomplete," Kilmer says as he surveys archives of years gone past.

There's a poignancy in Val, something that's inherent given the trajectory of Kilmer's acting journey. 

And yes, there's a tragedy in it too. But not once do the filmmakers wallow in the situation, preferring to pull together a sort of scrapbook of Kilmer's greatest moments and to use his writings and his son's voice to give insights into the legacy he's leaving.

Whether that sort of surface level approach suffices is perhaps at times debatable.

But there's no denying the thrill of seeing a young Kevin Bacon and Sean Penn goofing for a camera - even if their presence in the early days meant that Kilmer was bumped to third lead. Or the fact he only did Top Gun because he was under contract, and loved the director.

However, there are moments such as seeing him wheeled under a red blanket at Comic Con clearly ill after dealing with his Iceman-loving public, or hearing his reasons for quitting Batman or seeing the impact his brother's death and his mother's death have on him, when you feel like Val is touching something sublime, rather than resembling an at-times art project.

Ultimately, Val ends with Kilmer espousing a philosophy on life and his place in it that anywhere else would feel po-faced and almost arrogant. But in this film, it feels apt, engaging and almost spiritual. 

Val does offer some insights into the seemingly arrogant Kilmer, and gives another spin on the man only really witnessed through media and Hollywood. While it's perhaps unfair to paint this as an ending due to his condition, it does feel like the bittersweet culmination of a major chapter before the next one emerges - there's hope here and a feeling that even as one door closes, there are still plenty of options to explore.

Val begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video on Friday August 6