Badlands Story Hour Ep. 182: The Saint

Chris Paul and Burning Bright take on the 1997 Val Kilmer vehicle, and the verdict lands fast, this one is rough. Expect an entertaining teardown of a movie that was clearly built to launch a franchise and immediately fizzled, plus a genuine deep dive into Val Kilmer's eccentric career and the strange choices that pushed him away from Batman sequels and James Bond toward this instead. From there the conversation drifts into nuclear fusion, Russian oligarchy talk, and a pretty entertaining read on the film's ending as unintentional propaganda, complete with an NGO cameo that gets roasted hard. There's also some current events woven in around energy prices and manufactured scarcity. Stick around for boosts, a Vegas meetup mention, and next week's pick, a Depression era bootlegging drama with a killer cast neither host has seen.