Overall Rating
 Awesome: 3.57%
Worth A Look: 13.1%
Average: 19.05%
Pretty Bad: 11.9%
Total Crap: 52.38%
6 reviews, 132 user ratings
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| Batman Forever |
by Rob Gonsalves
"It feels like forever, too."
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The key to the first two 'Batman' movies -- 1989's 'Batman' and 1992's 'Batman Returns,' both directed by Tim Burton -- was their gloomy ambivalence about the hero.Committed to a huge project he didn't initiate, Burton showed no interest in the catharsis of crime-fighting; his Batman was a loner haunted by the random murder of his parents, doomed to keep playing the event in his head, sworn to protect the innocents of Gotham from the horror that shattered his life. (Burton and his screenwriters took a page from Frank Miller's 1986 revival Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.) And Michael Keaton, feeling a bit removed from this strange hero (but relating to his intensity), embodied Burton's depressed ambivalence: you saw it in the way he held his body -- stiff and pinched, even when he wasn't in costume. Even in 1989, Keaton knew he was too old to run around in a cape, and he gave Batman the weight of uncertainty. Burton and Keaton's Batman movies are really about two misfits trying to make sense of the all-time misfit: a man preserving peace through violence, upholding the law by breaking it.
The new Batman Forever dispenses with all that bothersome complexity. Despite its stabs at hipness, it's the campy no-brainer we were afraid the 1989 movie would be. Pinch-hitting for Burton, Joel Schumacher (Falling Down, The Client) tries to make Batman Forever a shoot-the-works bash, a deliberate departure from Batman Returns, which many found "too dark." But if this director has a personality, it hasn't snuck into any of his movies. Burton's controversial gothic gloom is gone, with nothing to replace it; Schumacher has overcorrected and made Batman too light. The director has no talent for action (every fight is shot so close in that you can't see what's going on) or for spectacle; generally, he gives us a brief establishing shot of each big, pricey set, which we never see again, and the camera never pauses to take in details. And what we do see gets drowned in pastel strobe lighting. (If I were the set designer on Batman Forever, I'd be pissed.) However, Schumacher (who started out as a costume designer) does show you every contour of the new rough-trade Batman and Robin suits. (For a daffy moment, we seem to be watching superhero fashion porn.)
Val Kilmer steps in as Batman this time. He's a fine actor -- rent Tombstone if you doubt -- and he performs smoothly, but the script gives him nothing to play; Batman is reduced to chintzy one-liners and even chintzier flashbacks to his parents' funeral. Kilmer's scenes as Bruce Wayne don't connect with anything he does as Batman. Unlike Keaton's Bruce, this Bruce isn't a lonely rich man adrift in his vast manor (like a four-color Charles Foster Kane) -- he's a slickster, a shrewd businessman. With the normally outgoing Keaton, you sensed the tension of the actor's restraining himself, trying to flesh out a pained man who hadn't developed a knack for small talk. (There was a sadness in the way Bruce's attempts at conversation petered out in the first Batman.) When Kilmer wears the Bat-suit, there's little difference between him and Keaton from the nose down; the continuity of those pursed lips is a mixed blessing, because sometimes I had to remind myself it was Kilmer, especially since both actors have the same aurally enhanced Bat-whisper. And because this Batman (unlike Burton's) isn't conceived as a quiet, embattled man seething with pent-up violence, Kilmer's performance has no tension. The virus of Gotham's sin hasn't infected him.
Critics accused the earlier Batman movies of forfeiting the action to the villains, who were more flamboyant than the hero. But Keaton provided a center of stillness, without which the glorious excesses of Nicholson, DeVito, and Pfeiffer would have lacked context. Kilmer isn't allowed to hold the center; he has too much competition from eager co-stars trying to wrestle it away from him. Four major characters introduced in a sequel are at least two too many. In Batman Forever we have the duelling ids Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey), and, as if they weren't enough, the long-awaited Robin (Chris O'Donnell) finally hits the big screen. Somewhere in the margins of the movie, Nicole Kidman's Dr. Chase Meridian tries to light Batman's fire, but the BDSM-doppelganger sexuality shared by Batman and Catwoman in the previous movie spoiled us for this Kim Basinger-type damsel-in-distress stuff. (Chase is shown to be a good fighter, but she hardly uses her skills.)
So who wins? Chris O'Donnell, the current cover boy of choice, gives a faintly embarrassing "I'm a tough guy now" performance. Near the end, Robin gets all duded up in his fabulous muscle-bound costume and then does ... not much. Despite Rick Baker's yin-yang make-up, Tommy Lee Jones' Two-Face couldn't be less interesting. He does the same flatulent mugging he did in Blown Away and Natural Born Killers; since he also did amazing and subtle work in last year's Cobb and Blue Sky, I'll forgive whatever he thinks he's doing here. It's up to Jim Carrey, and as soon as the camera singles him out, the movie's energy level soars; not much later, he takes over completely. Carrey gives the expected Tasmanian-devil performance, but he also lets us share his glee at playing his first villain in a summer blockbuster. His manic vibrancy -- he comes up with a terrific diabolical laugh when he kills off his prissy boss -- cuts right through the movie's muddle.
It helps, too, that Carrey is the only actor in Batman Forever who gets to shape his performance -- progressing from bitter nerd Edward Nygma, who experiments with brainwaves, to the megalomaniacal Riddler, who beefs up his IQ at the entire city's expense. By contrast, Two-Face is abruptly thrown into the plot right at the beginning, so that Jones starts off hammy and never varies. We don't get to meet him (as we did in the comics) as a crusading attorney disfigured and warped by an accident he blames Batman for, though this is explained in a news clip that barely registers. Two-Face seems like an afterthought, and I wondered why the filmmakers didn't just save him for the next sequel.
Batman Forever is boring and near-unwatchable; its title sums it up with cruel accuracy. But I can see why millions of people will go along with it. It's a Batman movie, and it's there, and the trademark pop visuals (what little we see of them -- the editing is wretched) make it a must to catch on the big screen. Yet I'd hate to think that people honestly accept this rhythmless blob as entertainment. Joel Schumacher may be going for the freewheeling, boldly colored escapism of the Batman comics of the '50s, but Dick Tracy already did that sort of thing as well as it can be done. Even Batman's dark nights of the soul are filmed in Schumacher's vapid, Michelob-commercial Flatliners mode.'Batman Forever' has no heft, no specific mood; it's the latest big, aggressive summer non-movie. It invites comparison (and not flattering, either) with the '60s 'Batman' TV series, which achieved the same level of proud, idiotic awfulness without having to spend $100 million.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=714&reviewer=416
originally posted: 01/27/07 13:08:12
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USA
11-Jun-1995 (R)
DVD: 18-Oct-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
29-Jun-1995 (PG)
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