The Weird Turn Pro

Batman Forever
1995, PG-13
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Story by Lee Batchler and Janet Scott Batchler
Screenplay by Lee Batchler, Janet Scott Batchler, & Akiva Goldsman

“Riddle me this, riddle me that; who’s afraid of the big, black bat?”  

How did that line grab you?  Was it cool?  Scary?  Corny?  Or was it more than a little homoerotic?  The dialogue throughout this movie is ferociously bad, so how any one line comes off is largely going to depend on an actor pulling a magical performance out of his ass.  It’s a good thing this movie has Jim Carrey.

A lot of people hate this movie with a passion.  Supposedly, it took the brooding darkness and cynicism of Tim Burton’s earlier movies and turned them into a tasteless joke.  I disagree with this sentiment, and I really didn’t hate this movie so much.  Maybe it was because I wasn’t so fond of its predecessor Batman Returns, and didn’t come to this movie with any anticipation.  Maybe it’s because Burton’s brooding darkness did get out of hand, and I was ready to swim out of all the melancholy and come up for a breath of fresh air.  Maybe… well, let’s face it.  What truly ruined this franchise was all the sex-soaked fetish scenes, and you’d be kidding yourself if you said that didn’t have its start in the previous movie with the disturbingly unappealing Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman.  Continuing this trend, all of the sexual content found its horrifying zenith in the fourth movie—Batman & Robin, and is now curiously absent from Christopher Nolan’s two Batman reboot films.  I don’t think you’ll be seeing it in the next one, either.  It didn’t make anyone happy.

What’s funny is this movie has a scene in it that seems to warn against this very path.  Dr. Chase Meridian, played by Nicole Kidman, exhibits a hardcore attraction for Batman.  In one scene, Chase kisses him and says, “My place, midnight.”  Later, in a scene which recalls Dracula, Chase is sleeping in a silk nightgown when Batman lands on her terrace.  She wakes, moves to her window and, seeing Batman, they embrace…. Hey, wait a minute!  She made a date at midnight with the man of her dreams, and then when midnight arrives, she’s sleeping?  How was Batman expected to know he should land on her second-story terrace and romantically wake her for the date?  What in holy hell is happening here?  If you ever wondered why we rate superhero movies in WTF’s, then there’s your answer.  The movie is so caught up in its Dracula imagery, it has ceased to make any sense at all, and no one seems to care.  But then comes my favorite part.  After the big kiss, she realizes that she’s in love with a costume—not a man—and she should grow the hell up.  Good thinking, Ms. Meridian!  Now relay your little cathartic discovery to Lois Lane on your way out.

Can I have a break?  In Jim Carrey, yes.  Let’s face it—the Riddler is a second-tier Batman villain at best, and Jim wrung a whole lot of entertainment out of him.  It also had a spark of originality, because a lot of us feared that the Riddler would just be another Joker, and that he most assuredly wasn’t.  They may have both been a bit crazy, but Jim Carrey’s mad genius was surprisingly different from Jack Nicholson’s homicidal artist.  To be honest, they weren’t even the same species.  Also, Jim’s hamminess was made to complement Joel Schumacher’s over-the-top direction style.  I love that the Riddler just won’t take Robin seriously because I won’t either.

Tommy Lee Jones isn’t that wonderful as Two-Face.  It looks like he’s trying, but he comes off a bit flat.  In some scenes you can see a clip of one of his zany facial expressions replayed a few times.  I guess the expressions were too rare for Joel Schumacher to get the amount he needed.  The script brutalizes Two-Face, a.k.a. District Attorney Harvey Dent.  Upon losing his mind, which happens off-screen, he is supposed to consult a coin before killing someone—leaving their fate to chance.  However, this Two-Face, upon receiving a heads or ‘good’ value, will just wait around and periodically keep flipping the coin until he gets the ‘bad’ result he desires.  Needless to say, Two-Face without the coin telling him to do something good once in a while, is characteristically reduced to a baddie that just delays himself from time to time.  He also has 1930′s stock villain things scripted for him like, “Curtains!” and instead of killing a helpless Batman at one point, he and the Riddler force him to solve puzzles and escape from zany ticking traps.  Yes, the Batman villainy has crashed back into cheesy Adam West territory.

One thing, before I drop this subject.  Did anyone notice that Harvey Dent was played in the earlier two movies by Billy Dee Williams?  How did Harvey Dent change from Billy Dee Williams to Tommy Lee Jones?  Folks, it’s more than a little bit difficult to obscure the fact that a black guy has transformed into a white guy.  Then again, did we really want to see Billy Dee Williams as Two-Face?  Egad, that would have been really strange.

I have not had a lot of good things to say about this movie, have I?  I did enjoy it overall.  Jim Carrey’s transformation into the Riddler is bizarre and riotously fun to watch.  Robin’s origin manages to be somewhat touching, and he was only minimally annoying.  Val Kilmer makes a tougher looking Batman than Michael Keaton did.  Batman Forever is a little more light-hearted in a good way, and less sex-saddled than it’s grimly disturbing, bondage & sado-masochism predecessor.  I’m going to catch a lot of heat for this review.  But fun is fun.  In the end, if you can’t achieve ‘staggeringly awesome’, then ‘fun’ will do in the interim.

Review by Master Jimmy