Martybear (Batman Returns)
Batman Returns
1992, PG-13
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Daniel Waters & Sam Hamm
Screenplay by Daniel Waters
If the first Batman movie was a cautionary tale about why Jimmy Olsen should never be left unsupervised (and really, shouldn’t that be obvious?), Batman Returns does the same for the legend of Mowgli. What if Mowgli was a mutant freak who was raised by penguins, and who, instead of taking advice from nice animals like Baloo and Bagheera, ran a gang of circus sideshow freaks? What if the only power the police possessed was the power to turn on a giant floodlight and summon a masked man in a rubber suit? Honestly, the police in this movie are that inept. They can’t even stop a guy on stilts from juggling torches in public. Is it any wonder Gotham City is world famous for its crime rate?
Fortunately for them, there’s Batman—the guy to know if you’re besieged by clowns, jugglers, or even ladies with well-trained poodles. Well, the poodle is a little tricky… I mean, you can beat down a gang of thugs and use a bomb to blow up a fat guy, but harm one hair on a killer poodle’s head and you know someone is going to freak out… nevermind.
There’s no way to get around it. Batman Returns is a little campy. There’s a little more Adam West and a little less Tim Burton in this sequel. It’s not awful, far from it, but something is missing after the level of darkness in the first film.
Burton himself, oddly enough, considered Batman Returns a darker film than the first. Trying to top “the world’s first fully-functional homicidal artist” with a pointy nosed guy who says “quack” a lot probably wasn’t the safest route to a darker picture of man’s inhumanity towards man. Of course, Burton believed it was darker , in part, because of the sexual themes… which basically came down to the fact that the Penguin was horny. Considering that by the cannon of the film he hadn’t had sex in thirty-three years, that’s perfectly understandable.
Compounding the problem of horniness was the addition of Catwoman; a skinny blonde with a sort of dominatrix/queen-of-the-undead thing going on. She takes it upon herself to do pretty much the same thing Batman does, persecute a megalomaniacal business mogul who has wronged her, but with a distinctly 1960′s women’s lib angle—complete with the beautifully cliched Helen Reddy reference—which meant she was destined to clash with her male oppressor for doing what she wants to do long before she ever knew she wanted to do it.
Can anyone else hear a rousing chorus of “Anything you can do, I can do better”, or is it just me?
The inclusion of Christopher Walken in any movie is always an entertainment booster, but in this movie it was sadly cancelled out. The guy playing his son in the movie was trying so hard to be like Christopher Walken that I just couldn’t take him seriously.
One point that I can’t complain about is the score. I never underestimate the importance of music in a movie. The right score can lift a scene as surely as the wrong score can drag it down. Danny Elfman (in my opinion one of the best composers of our time) delivers a fantastic musical score that really enhances the film, and, in my opinion, makes the whole thing that much more enjoyable.
Though Batman Returns is marked by a good amount of really bad moments, the film by itself is worth watching. In my book it rates just slightly better than the average film because of the brilliant score and because Michelle Pfeiffer gives a startlingly good performance as the Selina Kyle/Catwoman character. She did a very good job portraying the conflicting sides of her personality.
This one rates well enough for an occasional rental, but I wouldn’t own it.
Review by Martybear