This was Val Kilmer’s first big splash, and unfortunately for him it will probably always be his best splash. It is fun and inaccurate and irreverent, but what the hell, it is the best Geeks Make Good film ever made.
The plot is about a genius kid –- I guess he is supposed to be 15 or 16 — who by dint of his brilliance gets admitted to a Hollywood version of Cal Tech. Here, amidst a story line about some nefarious corporate and military bad guys stealing technology in order to do “bad things,” he gets laid and learns from the outrageously flippant Val Kilmer how to lighten up. Pretty simple. It is a film along the same lines of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in that its point is to have fun, stop being so serious, and break the rules every now and then. In retrospect it is very, very dated and kind of dumb, not something you will ever hear me admit about Ferris.
BUT……
I was a geek. I was a home-schooled, overweight, s/f loving, socially backwards geek. This was a movie about “my people” and for once they were treated with respect. They were not simply deviant outcasts to laugh at, they were heroic deviant outcasts to laugh with. The whole movie was an “in” joke in a lot of ways, and although stereotypes abounded, they were part of the joke, not the butt of it. Kilmer’s character is my favorite kind, the outrageous but intelligent scoundrel (see Ferris, Auntie Mame, and Calvin and Hobbes) who is always one step ahead of everyone else. So of course I loved him. But I also just love the whole movie, the interactions of the characters, and the idea that being a genius canbe fun too. I’m not a genius, alas, but I still relate.
Ironically, it is the comment of one of the bad guys, a very pompous professor, that I love the most. As he is talking to our young hero, who is about to embark on his great college adventure, he tells him: “Remember, we’re different from other people. Better.”
Oh my yes, isn’t it true? I do believe it is!
At IMDB: Real Genius
