Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticIn “Val,” the actor Val Kilmer, now in his early 60s, appears before us as a broken-down relic of himself.
His face, once beaming and chiseled, with that smile that resembled a bite, now looks soggy and morose, with dark eyebrows that give him an oddly Nixonian cast.
More dramatically, he speaks in a thin robotic rasp, the result of a procedure performed on his trachea to heal the throat cancer that was diagnosed in 2015.
Kilmer beat the cancer but was left with that scratchy voice-box drone, which takes a bit of getting used to. Yet once you do get used to it, you realize he’s very much the same fellow — or, at least, the older, wiser, more melancholy version.
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