The Saint is a 1997 film espionage thriller, starring Val Kilmer in the title role, with Elisabeth Shue and Rade ?erbed?ija, directed by Phillip Noyce and written by Jonathan Hensleigh and Wesley Strick. The title character is a high tech thief and master of disguise, that becomes the anti-hero while using the moniker of various saints while paradoxically living in the underworld of international industrial theft. The film has a cult following and was a 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 movies made between 1938 and 1954, a 1940s radio series starring Vincent Price (and others) as Templar, a popular British television series of the 1960s which starred Roger Moore, and a 1970s series starring Ian Ogilvy.