Martybear (Batman 1989)
Batman
1989, PG-13
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Sam Hamm
Screenplay by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren
This movie isn’t aging well. Sure, it’s twenty years old. The nifty special effects were sure to lose their luster as time went by. There’s only so much technology can advance before what was once a fine bit of movie magic becomes a quaint little reminder of how bad we used to be at fooling the camera… but the thing about this movie that is really crumbling under the passage of time is the script.
In the 1980′s most movies were written by people being forced, at gunpoint, to produce six feature-length scripts every week (thanks to the early efforts of the WGA they were allowed bathroom breaks on Sundays). Consequently, most of the movies that came out in that decade were—to put it simply—crap. They were milled out hastily by people who had absolutely no concept about what they were writing. Scenes were strung together in a fashion that only really makes the vaguest of sense if you’re a bleary-eyed, alcoholic writer in desperate to make your 7 AM deadline and it’s 5:48.
So, when Batman hit theaters in all it’s glorious mediocrity, everyone went bananas. Ooh, a PG-13 hero movie! How dark and inventive. Are we sure this isn’t too scary for children? Well, no. No, we’re not. That’s why we slapped it with a PG-13. (Don’t blame the parents of today for their stupidity, they learned it from their parents, who, in turn, learned it from their parents, who learned it from Ed Sullivan.) And you can’t blame them for going ape-shit over a mediocre movie. At that point, nobody had seen a good movie since The Empire Strikes Back almost a decade earlier. The bar wasn’t all that high in those days.
Still, Batman managed to exceed the impressively low standards of the day, and I can tell you why in two words: Jack Nicholson.
I’m not saying anyone ever had any delusions about it. The man got top billing—which is understandable—but he was also the villain. It’s a really interesting statement about a movie when the actor playing the title character gets second billing. But when a guy auditioning for the Joker hands you his resumé and it includes mental patients, psycho killers, and the devil himself, you pretty much give him whatever he wants.
The downside is that the rest of the cast was so dull in comparison. I find myself drifting in and out of this movie when the Joker isn’t on screen. Maybe that has something to do with Alexander Knox; Gotham’s answer to Jimmy Olsen. Only just to prove how different they are, Knox is a reporter who needs a cameraman instead of vice versa. Enter Lois Lane… er… Vicki Vale . You know, cause every hero needs a love interest, and it’s hard to do better than Kim Basinger. Although she does suffer from some serious Superman syndrome in this movie. Hmm… nerdy prude with glasses, ravaging sex goddess without.
Do the clichés ever end?
Well yeah, they do. Not enough to break free completely, but it did give people a taste of what things could be like if the studio process was shaken up a little bit. But once again, I think all the credit goes to Jack Nicholson, who played the Joker as equal parts Cesar Romero and The Killing Joke. I don’t think Michael Keaton really cuts to the heart of Bruce Wayne, and they could have put anyone in that giant rubber bat-suit.
That’s not what anyone wants in a Batman movie.
Review by Martybear