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Review: The Tim Burton-Joel Schumacher Batman Movies

Through nostalgia, some things that you thought were good as a child can still seem good when you become an adult, even if a film’s critical consensus seems to trail to the negative. With the Tim Burton-Joel Schumacher Batman movies, however, I’ve found that these films that I loved so much, that I watched so many times, over and above any of the Star Wars movie, I found that no level of nostalgia could save these movies, not even the first one, which is probably the best film of this film series, These are bad, and I fully acknowledge them to be bad, but man oh man did I still get a nostalgia kick from watching these movies.

Let’s start with Tim Burton’s Batman. This is a film that has absolutely no cohesive plot; it’s a movie where things just happen. The first third or so, before Jack Napier becomes the Joker, has at least some thread of mob boss Carl Grissom trying not to get exposed for his crimes. But after Jack Napier falls into the vat of acid and becomes the Joker, things just become a series of events that happen one after another with nothing to really connect them. One could argue that the Joker’s attempt to poison the city through body products such as cologne, perfume, etc. could count as a plot, but it’s resolved so early that it barely even counts as the main plot. Again, it’s just that things happen, and in the end, Joker dies and that’s it. This feels more like a skeletal first draft of a movie that needed significantly more thought put into it. However, the things that I did like as a child still hold up, and they are these: the visuals, Joker, and Batman. This film is beautifully dark and Gothic aesthetically, and for a child like myself in the 90s, it’s such a nice departure from clean and friendly material like the Teletubbies or Sesame Street. Joker is incredibly fun and funny in this; Jack Nicholson absolutely revels in this role, and every time, I feel as happy as he does. By no means, though, is he anywhere near as great as Heath Ledger or Mark Hamill as the Joker, but he is still fun and I enjoy watching him every second he’s on screen. And Batman... Michael Keaton is the definitive live-action Batman. Kevin Conroy may be the definitive Batman, but Keaton has such a dark gravitas even as Bruce Wayne that he comes across as more of an entity than he does as a character, and that’s truly impressive at a time when I don’t think any CGI was used to enhance his performance. It was purely on the strength of his acting and how he mastered the costuming.

I give Tim Burton’s Batman a 7/10.

Onto Batman Returns. Unlike Batman, this movie actually has a plot, and there’s probably more in the way of character development than in the previous film, but unfortunately, the plot that is here is just a mess. Keaton is still great as Batman, albeit not as good as he was in the first film, mainly because of the fact that he does have some weak moments (i.e. when he says, “Eat floor. High fiber.” to Catwoman after he knocks her down; Keaton had good delivery, but that line was just bad). And speaking of villains, the Penguin, though portrayed pretty well by Danny DeVito, is quite a pathetic villain in spite of his deliberately disgusting aesthetic. For fuck’s sake, he had three plans in this movie, and all of them were foiled so damn easily! In essence, the writing brought down the Penguin more so than DeVito; he did the best he could with the material he was given. For Catwoman, however, she was portrayed brilliantly by Michelle Pfeiffer, and I think she might even be on par with Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman from The Dark Knight Rises in terms of performance; unfortunately, while Catwoman shines both because of Pfeiffer and from the writing, it’s the latter that weakens the character somewhat, especially since Catwoman is written as a crazy. That works for a character like the Joker, but not for Catwoman, and it’s also an element that tarnishes the Penguin who is ordinarily more aristocratic in nature in other media. And then there’s Christopher Walken playing Max Shreck, and he’s just being Christopher Walken which is entertaining on its own, which probably makes him the best villain even though he’s playing a generic businessman villain; this would have been the most boring villain in this entire series if not for the fact that it was Walken who played this role. As for the film’s visuals, though still Gothic and dark in nature, it’s a step down from the first movie, as it feels so much smaller, given that this movie was filmed in a studio, unlike the first film which was filmed in at least one genuine city, and it looks more like a Tim Burton movie. Whereas the first Batman film was toned down in terms of directorial style, such that it wouldn’t have been a stretch for any other competent director to direct it, Tim Burton’s visual control is so distracting that I don’t even feel like I’m watching a genuine Batman movie; I feel I’m watching a Tim Burton movie that just so happens to have Batman in it.

I give Batman Returns a 5/10.

Moving onto Batman Forever. Of all the Burton-Schumacher films, this one is the one that I feel had the most potential to be legitimately good, especially since it has more of a solid plot than either of the Burton films and it has some genuine character exploration, if not outright development, of Bruce Wayne as a character and his struggle of the duality between his life as a man and as Batman. Val Kilmer even does a decent job of replacing Michael Keaton as Batman; by no means is Kilmer the best, but he’s pretty okay. Hell, I even love everything that was done with Dick Grayson, a.k.a. Robin played by Chris O’Donnell, as I did feel for his character with the loss that he went through when Two-Face killed his entire family. Bruce and Dick even have a good dynamic in how similar they are as orphans who lost their families to madmen. Unfortunately, nothing ever really comes of it beyond Dick becoming Robin and partnering with Batman, as Bruce trying to urge Dick away from vengeance is somewhat negated when Batman himself kills Two-Face at the end (and I’m not getting into how Batman going against vengeance is hypocritical after he killed the Joker and Penguin, even if he does say that revenge only makes things worse to Dick). And speaking of Two-Face, Tommy Lee Jones is fucking insufferable in this role; Nicholson managed to nail this performance as the Joker, especially since it worked for that character, yet the OTT performance that Jones delivers somehow feels wrong, and it’s definitely a horrible interpretation of Two-Face (especially when you compare him to the little screen time Aaron Eckhart had as the villain in The Dark Knight; fuck yeah does Aaron Eckhart trump Tommy Lee Jones in this role). Jim Carrey, on the other hand, manages to use his Jim Carreyness to his advantage, as he’s not so insufferable; he actually made me laugh not only as a child but as an adult because I just see Ace Ventura playing the Riddler. I would talk about Nicole Kidman as Dr. Chase Meridian, who plays a somewhat important role in trying to help Bruce as a therapist and as a love interest, but honestly, she’s the least interesting part of the film and I don’t have much to say about her. She’s played well given what Kidman had to work with, which is all I can say. As for the film’s visual style, it’s so glaringly fake yet charming; gone is the Gothic style of either Burton film, and in lieu of it, we have neon-lit plastic-looking backgrounds aided by some horribly dated CGI. It’s such a sharp visual contrast to Batman as a character that it goes against him thematically, yet there’s such a charm to its fakeness, as it looks so much like its time that it only makes me feel more and more nostalgic for the 90s, a time I have only vague memories of given my youth. If for nothing else, I do wish that the Burton visuals (preferably the ones from the first movie) were at least somewhat retained here so that it feels like it’s in continuity with the first two films, in spite of Michael Gough and Pat Hingle playing Alfred and Commissioner Gordon all throughout this film franchise.

I give Batman Forever a 6/10.

And now onto the true turkey of this franchise, the one that killed it for eight years before Christopher Nolan had to resurrect it with Batman Begins, Batman and Robin. Oh my fuck is this movie bad, and its 90s cheesiness, which goes above and beyond what Forever delivered, is only tolerated by me because of this movie’s luck that I grew up with it. The plot is basically an even worse, nonsensical version of Batman Forever yet still manages to be worse than the relatively plotless Batman or the sloppily-plotted Batman Returns combined. This neon-lit, plastic-y, badly-CGI’ed piece of shit makes me simultaneously look back fondly at my preschool days yet makes me almost want to puke. George Clooney is unarguably the worst Batman ever; he’s just George Clooney cosplaying as Batman and putting virtually no effort into his performance even as Bruce Wayne whatsoever. Chris O’Donnell becomes an insufferable whiny bitch, far from the sympathetic griever from Forever; he’s not Jar Jar bad, nor is he annoying enough for me to want to punch him, as I do kind of see where he’s coming from in this movie, but still, it’s kind of a step down from what we got in Forever. The villains? When has Arnold Schwarzenegger ever played a character that wasn’t either a killer cyborg or just Arnie? Here, he’s just Arnie dressed up, making horribly ice-related puns that make even me groan, and because of that, whatever menace he would have had as Mr. Freeze in this movie is pretty much quashed. Normally I like Arnold, but when he’s playing a villain, he should do better than this, especially after he was so terrifying as the Terminator in the first Terminator movie. Now Uma Thurman, on the other hand, is fantastically campy and like Jim Carrey as the Riddler before her, she makes it work and becomes endlessly entertaining as a somewhat detached deadly seductress who hates humanity (more specifically men, though) and wants plants to rule the world. However, Bane in this? You know, I know that Tom Hardy was pretty silly with the voice he used in The Dark Knight Rises, but he’s a hundred times more menacing in that movie (especially when he got angry over how his and Talia’s plans were foiled) than the hairless, monosyllabic, braindead hairless sasquatch that we have here; he’s even more of a joke than Mr. Freeze, and is defeated more easily and pathetically by Robin and Batgirl than Hardy’s Bane was by Cookie-Monster-Voice Christian Bale’s Batman. And Batgirl? Alicia Silverstone is probably the worst main actor in this movie, as she feels so out of place even in this overly-saturated-1990s piece of shit, and this was the decade in which Silverstone’s career thrived from movies like Clueless.

I give Batman and Robin a 4/10, with that extra point coming purely from nostalgia.

In conclusion, I found that as an adult, none of the Batman movies from 1989-1997 are any real good, and that as a child, I only liked them not only for Batman, even Clooney’s Batman back then, but also because of the pretty visuals and colors, even from the Gothic Burton ones. I realize now that I only enjoyed these movies because, back then, I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on beyond the basics of Batman needing to stop these villains because they’ll do generally bad things; I was just watching them because they had Batman in it and not much else. They’re all silly fun, though, even the Burton ones that were considered dark, but in the end, I am so glad at this point in my life that Christopher Nolan came along to deliver us a solid trilogy of good Batman movies that actually had stories and real character development and exploration (and I’m including The Dark Knight Rises; I know that movie has its critics, but I still love it). For the entirety of the Burton-Schumacher Batman series, I give it a 5/10.

#batman #1990s batman #film review #tim burton #joel schumacher