The Saint

The Saint is a 1997 American thriller film directed by Phillip Noyce, written by Jonathan Hensleigh and Wesley Strick, and starring Val Kilmer in the title role, with Elisabeth Shue and Rade Šerbedžija. The plot of the film revolves around the title character who is a high tech thief and master of disguise, who becomes the anti-hero while using the moniker of various saints. He paradoxically lives in the underworld of international industrial theft and espionage. The film was a modest financial success with a worldwide box office of $169.4 million, rentals of $28.2 million, and continuous DVD sales. It is loosely based on the character of Simon Templar created by Leslie Charteris in 1928 for a series of books published as "The Saint", which ran until 1983. The Saint character has also featured in a series of Hollywood films made between 1938 and 1954, a 1940s radio series starring Vincent Price (and others) as Templar, a popular British television series of the 1960s starring Roger Moore, and a 1970s series starring Ian Ogilvy. Plot At the Saint Ignatius Orphanage, a rebellious boy named John Rossi refers to himself as "Simon Templar" and leads fellow orphans in an attempt to run away. He tries to bid farewell to a girl named Agnes with a kiss, but they are caught and she accidentally falls from a balcony to her death. As an adult, Simon — now a professional thief dubbed "The Saint" for using Catholic saints as aliases — steals a microchip from a Russian oil company. Simon stages the burglary during a political rally for the company's owner Ivan Tretiak, a billionaire oligarch and former Communist Party boss rallying support against Russian President Karpov. Simon is caught by Tretiak's son Ilya but escapes with the microchip, and is hired by Tretiak to steal a revolutionary cold fusion formula discovered by Emma Russell, an American electrochemist working at Oxford; Tretiak plans to use Emma's formula for clean, inexpensive energy to monopolize the energy market during a severe oil shortage in Russia.