Blast from the Past Movie Review: Batman Forever (1995)

Yesterday some friends and I gathered for our weekly recording of Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. That afternoon, we watched and discussed Batman Forever, in which the Caped Crusader faces established foe Two-Face and new villain Riddler while acquiring a "ward," the angry young Dick Grayson. Here's the individual podcast. And now for the review...

The Good

*The first half of the movie is really entertaining. It starts out with a bang--Two-Face is robbing a bank (or some other institution that has a vault full of money) atop a high-rise in order to lure Batman to fight him. Things get more and more insane once Batman arrives, including a trap full of boiling acid and nothing less than the Statue of Liberty. It's really well-done.

*Although this will horrify some of my fellow reviewers, I thought a lot of the pithy lines were hilarious. The "chicks love the car" line when Batman is fending off the amorous attentions of Dr. Chase Meridian (more on her later) is one of the most amusing lines in the film. So's "the bat-signal is not a beeper." And then there's Alfred's bit about "the OTHER car" and how what's really the secret entrance to the Batcave is where Bruce keeps his dead wives.

*There are some good establishing character moments for Bruce Wayne himself--on the news we hear that he's announced a profit-sharing plan for workers in Wayne Enterprises and we later see him insisting that the family of an employee who (apparently) committed suicide receive full benefits even though that's against company policy for suicides. And when the Riddler, now the powerful executive of the NygmaTech corporation, tries to crassly triumph over him at a gala, Bruce good-sportedly congratulates him on his success, revealing that for all his success and grandiosity the Riddler is nothing more than a petty jerk. Val Kilmer does a good job playing the character and apparently he was creator Bob Kane's favorite Batman.

*Jim Carrey's performance as the Riddler is brilliant. He's hilarious and his line delivery is great, plus he can do the creepy aspects (he has a The Cable Guy-esque fixation on Bruce, his former employer) and the arrogance (he demands an answer from Bruce, the owner of the company where he works, NOW rather than sending his designs to Bruce's secretary) very well. The latter is actually somewhat painful to watch--here's a man who had the ear of one of the most powerful men in Gotham and threw it away because he was a demanding entitled jerk.

*Tommy Lee Jones is having a lot of fun as Two-Face and he's fun to watch.

*Although it's different from his comic-book origins, I liked seeing the birth of Robin and how it was tied into both Two-Face and Batman. Even though the rest of the Grayson family doesn't get much screentime, I did like their characterization. Rather than cower before Two-Face and his thugs, they hijack the bomb he's using to hold the circus hostage and use their acrobatic skills to maneuver it out of the tent and into the river, at a terrible cost to themselves. It's very well-done.

*To that end, the deaths of Robin's family at Two-Face's hands causing Bruce to have a lot of flashbacks to the deaths of his parents and how he developed his fixation with bats and his attempt to keep Robin from becoming what he's become (the early Batman depicted in the prior two films is a killer) makes a lot of sense.

The Bad

*The second half of the film suffers from a major case of the slows. Things pick up toward the end after Two-Face and the Riddler deduce Batman's true identity and attack Wayne Manor, but there's a long stretch of boredom.

*Chris O'Donnell is grossly miscast as Dick Grayson. I don't think he's a bad actor, but he is way, way too old for the part. There's no reason for Commissioner Gordon to leave him with Batman as his ward when he looks like he's 25. I'm not familiar enough with the lore to know just how old Dick Grayson was when he became Robin, but he would have probably been in his earlier teens. Yet we meet him riding a motorcycle to Wayne Manor and Bruce discusses him catching up with the circus (now "halfway to Metropolis") as though that was a serious option. He acts like an older teen or twenty-something much of the time, except for one scene where he basically flips out on Batman in what comes off as a temper tantrum.

(And his "kung-fu laundry folding" routine is just ridiculous to watch. Although I imagine its purpose was to show that he was capable of fighting before he rescued that girl from the gang of ravers, this could have been exposited some other way. Perhaps Bruce catches him beating on a punching bag or something.)

*Two-Face, though quite entertaining to watch, is completely out of sync with his comic book character. The DC character who commits violent crimes while laughing maniacally and acting hyper is the Joker, not Two-Face. Two-Face is a grim, violent nihilist with a split personality. I've only read a few Batman comics, but the impression I've got is that Two-Face's depiction in The Dark Knight is much more in sync with his comic-book character (and the character I vaguely remember from the animated series I watched as a kid).

*During the scene where Two-Face takes the circus hostage, Bruce Wayne proceeds to beat the hell out of a bunch of Two-Face's minions while trying to get to Two-Face. Note that I said "Bruce Wayne," not "Batman." The fact that billionaire Bruce Wayne got into a fistfight with a bunch of armed men and straight-up destroyed them is something that any media account of the event will include. That'd attract attention to Bruce that he doesn't really need. Granted, he was willing to reveal his identity as Batman to appease Two-Face earlier in the scene (but nobody heard him, not even his date or the annoying reporter who was hanging out with him) and there is a giant bomb that's about to go off, but at least some consequences would've been nice. Given how Commissioner Gordon brings Dick to Wayne Manor in the next scene, he could say something about how impressed he is with Bruce's fighting ability and Bruce could wave it off by saying he's been taking krav maga or something.

*Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman) is a really annoying character. She has some kind of love triangle thing going with both Batman and Bruce Wayne, even though the former is explicitly not interested. She's useful in precisely three ways--her kickboxing comes in handy when she and Bruce hold a staircase in Wayne Manor against a group of Two-Face's minions, she does a nice callback to Batman Returns when she asks if Batman would be more interested in her if she wore vinyl and wielded a whip, and her idea to play on Two-Face's fixation with coin-flipping comes in handy at the climax. Otherwise all she really does is throw herself at Batman at any given opportunity. She does have a meaningful name, which I did appreciate.

*"Holey Rusted Metal Batman." Yes, I know they were trying to make an in-joke about Robin's exclamations from the earlier Batman material in a way that was true to the new character (he's actually making an observation), but this one was a groaner. And coming from me, that's a big deal. And some of the campy aspects of the film were ridiculous rather than funny--the security guard panicking over the "BOILING ACID" was hilarious rather than frightening.

*During Batman and Robin's invasion of the Riddler's lair, Robin has the chance to kill Two-Face. Despite challenging Bruce's warning that desire for revenge will consume him for most of the movie, he suddenly has a change of heart without any obvious conflict.

The Verdict

*It has its entertaining parts, but it's not that great of a film overall. If only it had been edited a bit more tightly. Six out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Batman Returns (1992)

I wasn't able to attend the Myopia: Defend Your Childhood screening of Batman due to a church social event, so I made sure to participate in the podcast focusing on Batman Returns, which I wasn't allowed to see when it came out but whatever. In this one, Batman faces two new threats--a grotesque "penguin man" who emerges from the sewers to seek Gotham's highest office and a mysterious cat burglar wearing a lot of tight leather.

Here's the podcast. And here's the review...

The Good

*One of my fellow panelists described how Batman could have had an arc from the 1989 film through this movie to Batman Forever, but this got botched. However, I did some thinking and I think there's actually one there. In the first film, Batman kills the Joker and in this film Batman kills several members of the Penguin's gang. However, in Batman Forever, Batman tells Robin that if he kills Two-Face (who had killed his parents) that won't be the end of it. It's like he's warning Robin against going down the path he's walked already and managed to get off.

(The "Fridge Brilliance" TVTropes page, which I read after I came up with theory, suggests that his getting to know Catwoman and realizing not all criminals were faceless monsters might've been the cause for the change in behavior. Considering how the early Batman would kill and the later Batman would not, this means the movies were following the comic books).

*Another area where it shines is the acting and characterization of its villains. From the beginning the audience sympathizes with the Penguin, the victim of a comically Tim Burton-esque attempt at infanticide by his wealthy parents horrified at his deformed appearance and bizarre behavior (he did attack the family cat--by dragging it into the scarily cage-like playpen he was being kept in). He starts out wanting to find out who his parents were and reclaim his "birthright," although there are some hints that the evil plan of the climax is already stirring when we see him in the Gotham hall of records. Due to his lack of socialization (he was raised by penguins before being put in a freak show), he acts like a psychotic man-child much of the time, which can actually be pretty amusing (if vulgar).

Meanwhile, Catwoman starts out as an oppressed ditsy secretary whom her boss attempts to murder for knowing too much about his own evil scheme. Her acts of villainy--which are much less extreme than the Penguin's--are driven by a desire for personal empowerment vis-a-vis a world that has disdained her (and a boss who, before trying to kill her, was rather rude to her) rather than malice per se and she's rather conflicted about the whole thing rather than being remorselessly evil. Meanwhile, industrialist Max Shreck is greedy and amoral, but he's depicted (rather thinly) as a man who rose from nothing and wants to leave something for his son.

*The absence of Vicki Vale (Batman's love interest from the first film) is noted and explained.

The Bad

*Shreck is not a particularly good villain. He's trying to convince the Gotham city leadership to allow him to build a new power-plant (even though it's made repeatedly clear the city has plenty of power), a "power-plant" that actually drains and stores power from the city grid. When his secretary Selina Kyle discovers this he attempts to kill her (causing her to become Catwoman) and he sets up the boorish Penguin as his puppet candidate for mayor (causing most of the battles with Batman) to get rid of the mayor opposed to the plan. However, he's the most thinly-characterized of the villains and is a background figure most of the time. Furthermore, how does he plan to conceal this from the citizens? He's depicted as having committed other sins as well (owning "firetrap" slums, dumping toxic waste, and even having killed a prior business partner), but those are the sort of things that are relatively easy to conceal. Building a power-stealing fake power plant isn't. And trying to make a man who is for all intents and purposes a deformed vagrant your candidate for mayor? Really?

(Granted, the ridiculousness might be explained by this being a Tim Burton film...)

*The Penguin's scheming gets more and more ridiculous as the film goes on. He's for all intents and purposes a homeless man who has a gang of ex-circus performers as henchmen, but yet he commands a ridiculous amount of resources. If it was made clear he was diverting monies Shreck gave him for his mayoral campaign into, say, creating an army of trained penguins armed with rocket launchers, that would make more sense. I know the film isn't trying to be more realistic like the Nolan Batman films (in which the "supervillains" are terrorists and mobsters rather than, well, supervillains), but one wonders how he's actually doing this. Before this, he sends a circus train (similar to the trains you see carrying around little kids in malls) to kidnap the firstborn sons of Gotham's social elite to murder them--a train seen driving around the city without opposition or even notice.

*When Selina wrecks her apartment and begins her transformation into Catwoman, she assembles her new outfit out of a leather jacket. I don't think there's enough leather in that one jacket to make a full body suit. It would have been better if she was depicted as having several such jackets. She does seem to have a lot of clothes, so it wouldn't have been that hard.

*Batman's costume is really not that good. He can't turn his head and that affects his fighting style. At one point he tears his mask off and it looks like its made of pleather.

The Verdict

It's not boring, but it's really not that good. Six out of 10.