Batman Returns (1993)

With the teasers and early previews for Summer 2012's Dark Knight Rising, making the rounds online, the promise of a Nolan-revamped Catwoman from Anne Hathaway had me thinking about  Tim Burton's take on the feline seductress in his big-budget caped crusader sequel, Batman Returns, so after many, many years, I recently re-screened this film, and I found myself surprised at how much I detested it — I did not have the same reaction back when it was released in 1993.

Maybe it was Joel Schumacher's two abysmal follow ups that put the rose-colored glasses on my memories of this film...or maybe Batman Returns was a decent film that became dwarfed by the excellence of Christopher Nolan's re-imagined Batman franchise reboots, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.  I don't know, but after all these years, I harshly swallowed this thing like a giant bite of a weeks' old moldy cheeseburger — all that black crud coming out of the Penguin's mouth at the end of the picture seems an apt metaphor for where Tim Burton ended up taking this film.

The first problem here is that this film is even less about Batman than the Jack Nicholson love-fest of the original.  Burton, who obviously didn't understand what made Frank Miller's graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns so great, doesn't seem to grasp that people love Batman not for the kooky bad guys, but for the internal dichotomy of a man at war with himself.  I would not even consider Batman a major character in this film, as the three villains (The Penguin, Catwoman, and Max Schrek) get more screen time and character development than the film's namesake hero. 

Another problem is the total lack of charm all of the characters displayed. Nicholson's Joker was buffoonish and over the top, but at least he had some panache.  DeVito, Pfeiffer, Walken, and Keaton have all the mirth of a funeral dirge and make Christian Bale look downright cheery at times.  Burton goes for dark, but comes up dreary and somewhat ludicrous.  He starts out well by concocting an interesting origin story for the Penguin (despite its wide departure from comic book canon), but it all quickly falls apart from there, as Burton dips a little too deep into his usual bag of whimsy for a silly plot surrounding Penguin's desire to capture the firstborn children of Gotham City's elite citizenry using a fleet of rocket-bearing penguins to do his bidding.  Yes, it's as ridiculous as it sounds.

Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman...meow!

Michelle Pfeiffer's turn as Catwoman is memorable and sexy, but she is given too little to do, and though the chemistry between her and Keaton is pretty good at times, it's hurried and misses the golden opportunity to create a great love triangle situation with Bruce Wayne's girlfriend from the first film, Vicki Vail (Kim Bassinger), whose absence is puzzling since she is one of the only three people to know Batman's secret identity.  There are plenty of missed opportunities in Batman Returns, as the film is filled with a few short moments of brilliance that get completely bogged down in a cacophony of too many villains, too many unrelated plot turns, and cinematography/art direction that mires the entire production in despair and apathy.  It's hard to imagine that this series could sink further than this, but this ends up as a high-point when compared to the two films from Schumacher that followed.

RATED 2 STARS - DRY, AIR-POPPED (BUT GOOD FOR YOU—GAG!) STYROFOAM