9 Major Actors Who Just Made 5 Bad Films In A Row

The dry spell: Jay and SIlent Bob Reboot, Cinema Twain, 1st Born, The Super, The Snowman

In the midst of the current crisis, Val Kilmer has released a memoir in which he relates to the reader the time when he quasi-hallucinated his character in Top Gun - a film of fiction - having an encounter with his father's ghost. You know, "like Banquo in MacBeth." Sure, like all the ways Top Gun is like Shakespeare.

Val Kilmer is crazy, there's no denying that, and for years we've reaped the benefits of his madness with great performances in Tombstone, The Doors, even his work in Thunderheart deserves mention. However, we think we can pinpoint the very moment Val Kilmer lost what once made him so very special and that moment was Twixt:

That movie, which you now very much want to see, was an experimental film from Francis Ford Coppola co-starring Kilmer, Bruce Dern and Tom Waits. The experiment concocted by Coppola was more interesting on paper than the finished product: he would re-cut the film live, as it aired, like a DJ.

Alas, it was a failed experiment, followed by a series of barely-there appearances in The Snowman, The Super, Standing Up and a handful of films for which there are no Wikipedia entries. Kilmer barely appears in The Snowman, playing a retired detective driven mad, and his role is fairly incoherent - you can barely understand him.

All other recent works have been personal vanity projects honouring Mark Twain that are hard to get a hold of, failed attempts at self-mockery (he'll never top MacGruber) and low-budget horror features that go straight to streaming services.