A Review by Forrest Humphrey
The obvious follow up to my review of Tim Burton's “Batman” is to review the follow up, “Batman Returns!” Unfortunately, while I contend Burton's first outing of the Caped Crusader mostly holds up, the same cannot be said of his second.
Before I dive into why this film doesn't hold up nearly as well, if at all, I do want to cover the aspects of the film I do find commendable. Just like in the first, Burton gives Gotham extremely stylized Gothic architecture, and I adore it here just like the previous film. Danny Elfman's score might be even better here than in the first film, combining the dark tones of the previous film with Christmas music into a creepy harmony. Much like Jack Nicholson in the previous film, Michelle Pfiefer, Christopher Walken and Danny Devito put on solid to fantastic performances here.
So the film looks great, sounds great and has more great actors in it, why can't I praise this film like the previous one? The answer is very simple: The writing. The plot, tone and characters are a gigantic mess.
Lets tackle this one by one. I don't know what this movie is about. Last time it was quite simple. Violent gangster Joker is crazy and trying to commit lots of crazy violent crime and Batman has to stop him. Here we have three different villains and I don't know what any of them actually want. Walken's Max Shreck starts off pushing for a big power plant which Pfiefer's Selina Kyle (who at the start of the film is is assistant) finds out is actually supposed to steal power from Gotham instead of generate it. Where does this go? Nowhere. Shreck even kills Kyle over the discovery but this motivation just vanishes after Penguin (Devito) gets proper involved and starts his jumbled mess of plans.
Next we have Selina Kyle aka Catwoman. After Shreck kills her she is, follow me here, brought back from the dead by cats, has a huge mental breakdown and makes a sexy latex suit to become Catwoman, prowling the streets of Gotham for....some reason. She does want revenge on Shreck for killing her but that doesn't lead in any way to her becoming a psychopathic street criminal who wants to destroy Batman after he has the audacity to stop her. As much as Pfiefer owns every moment she's on screen with her commitment to the part and undeniable good looks her character makes no sense, and is a disservice to her source material who was very much a sane individual who's empowerment and agency are entirely her own. In the film, Selina taking agency in her life is framed as a result of post-death brain damage, and that just doesn't sit well.
Now we come to it, Danny Devito as Penguin. The film begins with his birth, a monster so horrifying we don't get to see the baby, only for his parents to toss him off a bridge where he floats into the sewers to be raised by penguins, coming back to Gotham over thirty years later. His plan? Well at first he fakes saving the mayor's baby to garner goodwill with the populace and get some love and respect after his hellish life in the sewers and find out who his parents were so he can find his human name and identity. Except this is a ploy, he's actually evil! So what's his true plan? We don't know yet, but he teams up with Walken's character to...run for Mayor.
Why? Who knows, I sure don't and after his vile ways are discovered the campaign ends and we DO find out his real plan: lots and lots of murder. Because he used his time researching his family to actually get the names of every first born son in Gotham and kill them so all of Gotham's families will be miserable like him. I guess. But again Batman has the audacity to stop him so he changes plans again. This time? Kill lots of people by gathering all the penguins in the sewers, strapping bombs to them and having them suicide bomb the city for maximum carnage. Batman stops him, Selina kills Shreck and gets her revenge, the end.
So we found two other problems in my rant about Penguin, who despite barely resembling the comic character of the same name (they're both short, wear suits and have crazy umbrellas. That's about it) Danny Devito DEVOURS every scene he's in, the man is a master actor and he committed entirely to this deranged, creepy character, which does make him at least fun to watch. The first problem is tone. Or lack thereof in this case. We go from a horrifying origin about a baby being abandoned by its parents, to it being raised by sewer penguins. From kidnapping and murder, to penguin based suicide bombers. This film has no idea if it wants to be a depressing study on broken people or a zany comedy, it clashes horribly and gives the viewer whiplash from scene to scene quite often.
The other is an even bigger problem. This movie is called “Batman Returns” and yet I managed to summarize it while barely even mentioning he was in the movie. The film is nearly two hours long and Batman is maybe in thirty minutes. Keaton has almost nothing to work with here. He simply appears to stop the villains or have an incredibly stilted “romance” with Selina. Keaton and Pfiefer are both fantastic performers but they have no chemistry here. What little time Batman does have shows Burton really doesn't get the character either. Batman racks up a hefty body count in the film, from lighting a goon on fire with the Batmobile's exhaust to throwing another one down a hole with a bomb. I think he has more on screen kills than Penguin! And while it wasn't as noticeable in the previous film, the increase in action just highlights how cumbersome the rubber batsuit is, and the hand to hand fighting suffers from horrible choreography as a result, leaving all the action painful to sit through.
So yeah, as much as I love Burton's Gothic Gotham and Elfman's great music, as well as how much the cast clearly had fun, “Batman Returns” is a huge mess. You might still have a good time with it, I can, but there are plentiful reasons this one doesn't get the loving nostalgia its predecessor does.
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