Simon Templar, known by the moniker "The Saint", first appeared in the 1928 novel "Meet the Tiger". It wasn't a great book but it was an entertaining read featuring an intelligent and disheveled thief who liked to help out where he could. Starting with the next three novellas the author Leslie Charteris, who wrote The Saint, morphed him into a suave, well-dressed, flippant, and usually an on-top-of-things criminal who robbed the "ungodly" and gave away all but a fraction of what he stole to charity. To this character life was a game. He lived for excitement and loved nothing more then to befuddle the police (which is more where his charitable offerings stemmed from rather than a desire to do good). But the thing that stood out the most about him was that while he was a great fighter he preferred to use his intellect to bring down his opponents.
While none of the adaptions of "The Saint" come close to capturing the epic qualities of the character found in the novel series (and this is epic in the most literal sense), at least the Roger Moore adaptation and a couple of the others managed to reflect it well enough. This one is an entirely different story. This Saint is far too serious about everything. Where his novel counterpart would have made up a limerick to annoy his enemies this "Saint" stares them down and spits out a generic one-liner every now and then. Which leads us to the biggest problem of the entire movie. It is generic. There is not a plot twist or characterization that has not been seen a dozen or so times before. The hero is generic. The action is generic. The Villains are generic. And the love interest is especially generic.
The novels weren't perfect, and anyone who read them knew how they would all turn out, but they were fun. This wasn't. While the first book "Meet the Tiger" has been out-of-print since the 80s. All the other books can be found in nice new trade paperbacks or even on kindle. This reviewer recommends that one reads either "Enter the Saint" or "The Saint Closes the Case", or watch the 1960s TV series with Roger Moore, but forget about this adaptation which features a "Saint" less three-dimensional than his iconic stick-figure logo.
While none of the adaptions of "The Saint" come close to capturing the epic qualities of the character found in the novel series (and this is epic in the most literal sense), at least the Roger Moore adaptation and a couple of the others managed to reflect it well enough. This one is an entirely different story. This Saint is far too serious about everything. Where his novel counterpart would have made up a limerick to annoy his enemies this "Saint" stares them down and spits out a generic one-liner every now and then. Which leads us to the biggest problem of the entire movie. It is generic. There is not a plot twist or characterization that has not been seen a dozen or so times before. The hero is generic. The action is generic. The Villains are generic. And the love interest is especially generic.
The novels weren't perfect, and anyone who read them knew how they would all turn out, but they were fun. This wasn't. While the first book "Meet the Tiger" has been out-of-print since the 80s. All the other books can be found in nice new trade paperbacks or even on kindle. This reviewer recommends that one reads either "Enter the Saint" or "The Saint Closes the Case", or watch the 1960s TV series with Roger Moore, but forget about this adaptation which features a "Saint" less three-dimensional than his iconic stick-figure logo.