Kilmerthon: Blind Horizon (2003)

 

All Kilmerthon reviews are sorted under the label "Val Kilmer".

 

Out of 5:

Story: ⭐⭐⭐

Dialogue: ⭐⭐

Characters: ⭐⭐⭐

Visuals:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Soul:⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Kilmer:⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

Watched Aug 2, 2024

I actually really enjoyed this movie, but part of me wonders if I’m just starved for movies with intentional design. I recently came off of a very high vitamin D prescription meant to amend a vitamin D deficiency. This movie felt like that prescription, going gloriously overboard in both visual and auditory departments. In a contemporary amateur cinema landscape that’s in love with run-and-gun filming and shooting on locations that require zero additional set decoration, this was a much-appreciated change of pace. (I fear for my future aspirations of being a production designer haha)

 

Blind Horizon, essentially, is Will Wemer’s Paris, Texas but with an assassination subplot. That’s what it is. A man found unconscious in the Texas dessert wakes up from a coma with amnesia and no memory of who he is, but he does have one strong conviction – someone is about to make an attempt at the president’s life. Constrained to the small town setting of Blackpoint, Val Kilmer’s character Frank attempts to figure out who he is while the sheriff attempts to put the pieces of Frank’s attempted murder together, slowly realizing that Frank’s fears might not be entirely unfounded.

 

Now, I loved Paris, Texas, so I’m down with a thriller rip-off. I was hoping to find some hidden gems in this endeavour and this may be one of them. And it seems like doctor/detective/agent characters are a recurring theme in Kilmer’s filmography so I guess I better develop a taste of this genre.

 

I think Sam Shepard and Noble Willington had good on-screen chemistry and their characters, especially Shepard's, offers a grounding element of normalcy when compared to the very destabilizing scenes told from Frank’s point of view. The sheriff stands in for the audience, and we're trying to figure out everything alongside him. I’ll always question the realism of a Columbo-esque cop who genuinely cares about doing his job right but hey, movies are for escapism.

 

The last act reveal/plot twist was not as complex as the flashbacks set it up to be, in my opinion. I love a movie that gives me a puzzle to solves, but I don’t think I was given particularly useful pieces – the relevancy of the pieces mostly came after the reveal of their punchlines.

 

As for Kilmer in this movie, I think he blended into the dusty landscape surprisingly well. He’s amnesiac throughout most of the movie and so carries this Little Boy Lost demeanour, which can either be done well or not well… I give his depiction a 5/10. Again, I feel Paris, Texas is a better example.

 

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. I’d stick my neck out for it. It didn’t bring a ton of new offerings to the table but at the very least, I found it memorable – I feel like these low budget efforts are often doomed by being super forgettable, a fate far worse than being “bad”, in my opinion. I have to give props to director Michael Haussman for taking his cool 5mil and trying to do something interesting with it. I feel like this is a rough gem.