Val Kilmer vs. Jeff Bridges
Battle of the Second-Tier Leading Men

With the second tier of Hollywood's leading men -- Kilmer, Bridges, Kurt Russell, Dennis Quaid, George Clooney -- becoming perilously overcrowded, and considering their recent, paralleled career stagnation, one of these two must go. On the surface, it's easier to make a case for sparing Kilmer, who was very fine in Top Secret and who, as a sweaty, tubercular Doc Holliday in Tombstone, stole the movie right out from everyone (well, from Kurt Russell and Bill Paxton, not exactly the Brinks guards of Hollywood actors). In fact, right up through Willow and, say, Thunderheart, Kilmer was a reliably pleasing, even vaguely underrated, leading man.

Lately, however, he's abandoned his former vocation of making decent movies in favour of sleepwalking through projects like The Ghost and the Darkness, The Saint and At First Sight, and spending his time generally looking bloated and inexplicably pleased with himself, and having articles written about him with titles like "Is Val Kilmer the Most Hated Man in Hollywood?" Most of this recent ill will can be traced back to his repulsive turn in The Island of Dr. Moreau, a train wreck of a movie made all the more annoying by Kilmer's penchant for sneering smugly through every scene, as if to let the audience in on the fact that he's quite aware that he's in an unwatchable piece of shit, and that, furthermore, he has no intention of lifting one finger to make it any more watchable.

Jeff Bridges, on the other hand, turns in solid if unspectacular performances in just about every movie he shows up in, but is a negligible box-office draw, as that movie with Tommy Lee Jones -- Short Fuse or Kaboom! or Blown Away: oh, that's it -- and the flopping-as-we-speak Arlington Road, collectively prove. Right before Kaboom! came out, the favoured media story about Jeff Bridges was that he's America's Great Underappreciated Actor, a theorem based apparently on his great, underappreciated work in such great, underappreciated fare as Tron and The Fabulous Brothers McMullen and Help! Our Plane Crashed! and I Found Robin Williams Under A Bridge.

So Fametracker presents you with a choice: the once-promising but increasingly unctuous and distasteful Val Kilmer in this corner, and the stalwart if uninspiring poor man's Harrison Ford Jeff Bridges in that corner. In a stunner, FT votes for Kilmer by a very slim margin, since we don't have to ever actually work with him or meet him.

Advantage: Val Kilmer.