The 10 best Val Kilmer movies ranked, from the slapstick of ‘Top Secret!’ to the soul of ‘Heat’

10. Batman Forever (1995)

Nobody thinks of Kilmer when they think of Batman. The actor even acknowledged as much in a brilliant bit on Life’s Too Short. But he has his defenders, including Batman Forever and Batman & Robin director Joel Schumacher.

“For me, Val Kilmer was the best Batman,” Schumacher said in a 2011 interview. “I thought he looked great in the costume, and I thought he brought a depth to the role. I thought the relationship between Val and Nicole Kidman was very sexy.”

He’s not wrong about Kilmer’s look and his chemistry with Kidman, one of the stronger aspects of a film that was so thoroughly diminished by its toyetic aspirations.

“Whatever boyhood excitement I had was crushed by the reality of the Batsuit,” Kilmer said in the 2021 documentary Val, per The Hollywood Reporter. “Yes, every boy wants to be Batman. They actually want to be him…not necessarily play him in a movie.”

He continued, “I think it made no difference what I was doing. I tried to be like an actor on a soap opera.”

We think he’s being modest, though. “From the moment you see Val Kilmer’s rosebud lips protruding from Batman’s cowl, you know he’s going to inhabit the role in a way that Michael Keaton, with his dyspeptic uncertainty, never quite did,” EW’s critic wrote in their review. “Kilmer doesn’t get to show a lot of personality — he still has to think and speak in comic-strip balloons — but he’s commanding enough to make you believe in Batman as a stoic natural force.”

9. Top Secret! (1984)

Perhaps nobody summed up 1984’s Top Secret! better than the late film critic Roger Ebert, who declared that “instead of a plot, it has a funny young actor named Val Kilmer.”

After all, it’s unclear if people would still be talking about Top Secret! if not for Kilmer’s turn as an egotistical rock-and-roller who gets swept up in an espionage plot in East Germany.

It was the 24-year-old actor’s first big-screen role after graduating from Juilliard. Yet he deftly navigated the script’s rapid-fire barrage of jokes, gags, and slapstick set pieces, sometimes as the straight man and sometimes as the comedian. Throw in the singing and dancing (and that face, my goodness) and it’s not hard to see how he became an icon.

Kilmer, however, has admitted to taking the role a bit too seriously. “I (loved) the boys and their comedy, but it took me 25 years to ‘enjoy’ not knowing what is going to happen on a set,” he told ScreenCrush on the film’s 30th anniversary. “My acting training is formal and I was fresh out of Hamlet-land and the Juilliard School. The boys always wanted me to have more fun, but I wanted to be good and I took it all way too seriously.”

8. Spartan (2004)

Spartan likely won’t be remembered as writer, director, and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet’s best film, nor will Kilmer’s turn as Delta Force member Robert Scott be as fondly recalled as his roles in other, better films. Still, it deserves a mention, if only as another example of Kilmer’s talent for locking into singular strains of speech.

Historically, Mamet’s hard-boiled dialogue is as muscular as it is funny, but it’s not known for sliding off the tongue. Kilmer, however, skillfully gets his mouth around it in this head-scratching political thriller, marching through scenes, barking out orders, and munching apples with enough verve and confidence to make us feel as if, sure, we know what’s going on.

That Kilmer is so good in Spartan belies how much he actually grew to dislike Mamet while working on the film. “He’s cruel,” Kilmer said on the film’s DVD commentary track. “He hates actors, having failed at the profession himself. There were a lot of tears on the set. It was tough, because you’d be playing a tough guy and he’d break you down. But in front of everyone too, he wouldn’t do it in the trailer. I hate him.”

7. The Salton Sea (2002)

D.J. Caruso’s shaky but compelling The Salton Sea finds Kilmer playing a tatted-up, trumpet-playing undercover agent with a Mohawk who ventures deep — too deep — into a culture overrun by crystal meth.

“Val Kilmer seems especially refreshed as a loner sunk deep below a psychic sea level of his own,” EW’s critic wrote in their review. “He slithers in and out of identities — as a junkie, a snitch, a jazz musician, a husband avenging the death of his wife — and the slipperiness suits the actor’s talent for suggesting that beneath the man we see is another we’ll never know.”

6. Tombstone (1993)

EW didn’t love Tombstone when it came out, but the 1993 Western about Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell), Doc Holliday (Kilmer), and Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn) has endured over the years, despite its troubled production. Perhaps that’s because it’s among the best “dudes rock” movies of the past half-century.

”Wyatt and Doc is one of the great love affairs of all time between two men,” Russell told EW at the time. ”It’s a strange, tough, violent, deep relationship.”

EW’s critic initially lambasted Kilmer’s showy performance, saying he “speaks in the absurdly cultivated tones of a Southern gentleman gone elegantly to seed,” adding that the actor “works hard to give his scenes an undercurrent of outrageousness.”

To each his own, of course, but we can’t say we’ve ever seen another actor that could exude so much swagger while playing a man dying from tuberculosis. Kilmer somehow makes power, frailty, and deterioration coexist as Tombstone unfolds. And that drawl? We could listen to it all day.

5. Real Genius (1985)

One year after his debut in Top Secret! and one year before stepping up as Top Gun’s Iceman, Kilmer led Martha Coolidge’s comedy Real Genius, playing a Caltech wiz-kid (and hard-partying wiseass) tasked with designing a chemical laser.

While the actor radiates charisma and versatility in Top Secret!, Real Genius was the film that allowed him to play an actual character with interiority and pitch-perfect comic timing.

“As an older, wiser, and ruder student at an institute for young brainiacs, Kilmer makes being an antisocial intellectual seem both sexy and sympathetic; as a performer, he gives off a balletic comic wisdom that’s a joy to behold,” EW’s critic wrote in 1997.

4. Top Gun (1986) / Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Kilmer didn’t want to play Iceman in Top Gun, writing in his memoir that “the story didn’t interest me.” Director Tony Scott, however, knew that flattery was the way to Kilmer’s heart. “Ultimately, he overwhelmed my disdain for the project with pure unadulterated positivity,” Kilmer wrote. “Every day he would exclaim, ‘This is incredible! This is beautiful! This is beyond belief. You guys are going to be kings.'”

Later, after delivering a cool and charming supporting turn as Maverick’s rival-turned-wingman, he developed a strong attachment to the role, writing that he even saw Iceman’s father in his trailer, “the way Macbeth saw the ghost of Banquo.”

While Iceman wasn’t an emotional anchor of the original film, Kilmer’s real-life condition gave his return in Maverick added resonance. “A brief interlude with Kilmer, who has largely lost his voice to cancer, is… surprisingly moving,” EW’s critic wrote.

Cruise reflected on Kilmer’s performance during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live. “I just want to say that was pretty emotional,” he said. “I’ve known Val for decades, and for him to come back and play that character… He’s such a powerful actor that he instantly became that character again. You’re looking at Iceman.”

Speaking with EW, Kilmer said, “Coming back to work with Tom more than 30 years later, it was like no time had passed at all.”

3. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of the best buddy cop movies that’s not really a buddy cop movie. It also reminded the public that its two volatile stars — Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. — were two of the best in Hollywood. Kilmer stars as Gay Perry, a sharp-tongued private eye tasked with showing a thief-turned-actor the ins and outs of the P.I. game.

Though it was a box office dud, EW heaped praise on the pair’s performances, calling Kilmer “divine” and praising both actors for the “beguiling zest” they brought to “Black’s knowing, literate script.”

The original review continues, “Kilmer, meanwhile, has never looked like this — so big yet precise, and so at ease with Perry’s caustic, intrinsic homosexuality. Anybody armed with Black’s sparkling dialogue (created for a character as tough and confident as he is queer) could, I suppose, have lived it up as Gay Perry. But none, I daresay, could have made the splash of the former Batman.”

2. Heat (1995)

Don’t call him a henchman.

Despite being a master thief, crack marksman, and loyal associate of Robert De Niro’s Neil McCauley, Kilmer’s Chris Shiherlis is the heart and soul of Heat, his devotion to wife Charlene (Ashley Judd) somehow the most tender of any relationship in Michael Mann’s sublime crime epic.

But Kilmer never lets his performance drip into sentimentality or solemnity — he shows us his smile just two times across 170 minutes, and each time it hits like a slug to the chest.

“While working with Val on Heat I always marveled at the range, the brilliant variability within the powerful current of Val’s possessing and expressing character,” Mann wrote Tuesday in an Instagram tribute to the actor. “After so many years of Val battling disease and maintaining his spirit, this is tremendously sad news.”

1. The Doors (1991)

The Doors singer Jim Morrison was such a singularly strange figure that EW’s review of Oliver Stone’s 1991 docudrama spends an entire paragraph detailing how impossible it should be to play this role.

He’s a “superstar hippie with an aura of pre-counterculture masculinity,” a “glamorously disheveled, pornographic Dionysus” who “lent a unique, mesmeric clarity to the primordial yearnings of the late ’60s.” Yet Kilmer did it — all while capturing the timbre and distinct phrasings of Morrison’s vocals.

“As Morrison, Val Kilmer gives a star-making performance,” EW’s critic lamented. “…Kilmer captures, to an astonishing degree, the hooded, pantherish charisma that made Morrison the most erotically charged pop performer since the early days of Elvis. Morrison, as Kilmer plays him, seems lost in his own space, and his sexual lure springs from this ethereal self-absorption.”

Paying tribute to Kilmer, actress Jennifer Tilly took to her X account with a story of the casting call for The Doors. “A sixties convertible came screeching up, blaring Doors music at top volume,” she writes.

“And a guy jumped out and strode inside: He had wild hair and he was barefoot, shirtless, and wearing nothing but a pair of tight leather pants. We all looked at each other like… Who is this guy? We were more than a little shook by the sheer audacity of his entrance. Well of course it was Val Kilmer and from that minute on, nobody else stood a chance. RIP King.”