The Traveler

A nameless drifter (Val Kilmer) ambles into a police department in the middle of the night to tell the night watchman that he has killed six people. Arrested and booked, the drifter tells Detective Black (Dylan Neal) that the murders haven't happened yet. The six police officers quickly find that the man in their captivity is describing what will happen to them throughout the night.

Val Kilmer's newest straight-to-video offering is a clever, definitely creepy idea that never quite connects with the themes it tries to make or the audience is tries to draw. Kilmer has staked his claim with low-budget action, now he tries his hand at horror. He's just short of what could have been a royal flush.

"The Traveler" has some aspects in its favor. Kilmer ably performs the mysterious stranger, though his performance seems to unravel as the film draws to a close. John Cassini and Chris Gauthier play two of the potential victims and come close to being memorable. The latter especially does his best with what he has and makes a sympathetic performance. Though no one matches Dylan Neal, who is the strongest of the cast as the detective with something to hide.

"The Traveler" is also not without its faults. Clichéd, hackneyed characters do little to make the film better. As the film continues on, it faces problems with continuity and elaboration on exactly who the stranger is. The biggest downturn is the script, which offers fewer and fewer answers to the questions it asks and doesn't seem interested in answering any of them by the end, leaving me a puzzled viewer.

I give it a well-deserved five out of ten stars. It's a solid effort and worth a watch if you want a film that both makes you think and turns your brain off.

I agree with most of the reviews here, the movie (and acting) is awful and it looks like they've stolen Val Kilmer from a Wax Museum.

I'm more concerned with Val Kilmers career. Val Kilmer has always been one of my favorite actors and for a while now I've been hoping for a miraculous comeback. I don't have a clue as to why he's been wasting his talents on most of the movies he has starred in for the past few years. A part of me wants to believe his appearance and recent B-movies will make for a stronger comeback when he returns physically fit and giving a strong performance in a good movie.

My favorite Val Kilmer performances:

Comanche Moon - Deja Vu - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - Wonderland - The Salton Sea - Heat - Tombstone - Thunderheart - The Doors

Hopefully there will be many more to come.

How about Val Kilmer and Steven Seagal, both lean and fit starring in a good thriller/action movie? That would be something..

When asked about a particular cinematic floater in which he had appeared, Robert Mitchum replied, "They pay you for the bad ones too!" I am assuming that Val Kilmer has adopted that as his personal mantra to get him through this latest phase of his career. So far in the past week I have watched Kilmer in The Traveler, Streets of Blood and The Thaw and all of them are terrible.Not his fault, of course, he's just an actor. He is forced to deal with the scripts he is given.

The Traveler shows promise at the start, despite the derivative nature of the script and the stereotypes that take the place of characters. Once the supernatural huggery-muggery begins that promise rapidly begins to fade. The story makes no sense. At first it is hinted that Kilmer is the ghost of a wrongly killed man and he is going to enact revenge on the deserving occupants of the police station a la High Plains Drifter. If the script would have stayed with that angle it might have produced an interesting film,if only on the simplistic and preachy level of an old Twilight Zone. But the pernicious influence of M. Night Shyamalan on a whole generation of screenwriters forces the offending scripter to try a big twist at the end and--a common failing with gimmicks of this type--the big reveal is absurd and makes no sense. It also invalidates everything that came before in terms of logic or coherence. Ah well, better luck next time.

I just signed up to Netflix and whilst scrolling through the horror section i came upon this movie.I always find characters who refuse to reveal who they are or what their motivations are always fascinating.I think the film is succinct and there is no unnecessary filler to pad it out.In essence it is basically a haunted house horror film,but the haunted house in question is a police station.There is plenty of gore in this film,but i think its justified in the sense that what the perpetrators of the offence did, deserved to have grisly terminations for there guilty deeds.The film is succinct and has no unnecessary filler,i can wholeheartedly recommend this film to any horror fan without question.Just like to add,do people give this film one or two stars just to look clever or smart, because it doesn't impress me very much.The new blood sport,ripping a movie to shreds for no discernible reason....very sad people.

Other reviews find this, cinematically interesting experiment, to be dull, pedestrian, and facile. I, on the contrary was stimulated by the droll, impassive - almost virtuoso performance of a man without an identity - Mr. Nobody - who appears suddenly and conveys portents of impending menace, to my mind, highly effectively. This existential anti-hero, apart from being obviously psychotic, also possesses both black and white magic - a schizoid Magus. Val Kilmer certainly brought conviction to the abstract demands of this role. While the movie is bound by the superficial conventions of the genre, I thought that it brought a certain flavor of dread that epitomizes the existentially hopeless predicament, with a piquant touch of drollery that so many jaded but sophisticated viewers find amusingly stimulating or camp in this genre. If you like Val Kilmer - who doesn't? - and the horror/ supernatural theme, then this is certainly worth watching!