Batman Returns Review

I am a huge fan of comic book superheroes.  Maybe it’s the tights… I don’t know.  But for as long as I can remember I’ve always been interested in the ordinary person (more or less) taking it upon themselves to make their world a better place through whatever means available to them.

And this idea has never been truer than with my favorite superhero Batman.  He’s got it all; the money, the house, the car, the butler, the adopted child… well, he’s got the car.  But really the best part is that he’s just a man.  No super strength, no flight, no invisibility.  Just a guy with unlimited funds and access to technology of every kind.  And his motivation couldn’t be more powerful.  His parents shot dead before his eyes by ‘some guy’.  This speaks to me very much as I have lost an uncle to a homicide.  It’s something you really never forget, the kind of thing that makes you angry more often than sad.  Bruce Wayne wanting to keep this sort of thing from happening to people is the real drive of the character, it’s what makes him the best.  Oh, and he’s got the best costume.

So in 1989 Warner Bros. put out Batman from Tim Burton.  That’s a whole other review.

For now let’s stick to what I think is the better of his 2 Batman movies.  1992’s Batman Returns.

We begin with some rich couple tossing their mutated infant into a sewer.  Not exactly the summer action movie beginning you’d hope for.  Then we jump to present day Gotham City at Christmas time.  We got Christopher Walken’s Max Schreck scheming to control the city’s power supply, with his mousy (!) assistant Selina Kyle played by Michelle Pfeiffer, oh we’ll get to her.  This mutant sewer baby has grown up to be the perverted (excellent touch) Penguin, he’s played by the perfectly cast Danny DeVito.  The Penguin says he wants to get to the surface to find out who his parents are but his real plan is so cold and pure evil it’s almost too much.  Selina gets pushed out a window by Schreck after discovering his power plot.  This errs her to become a vicious Catwoman.

Meanwhile Bruce Wayne sits in his mansion waiting nightly for the Bat signal to go up so he can rush in and pummel some hooligans… so to speak.

It all gets going with The Penguin making a bid for Mayor of Gotham City and trying to frame the Batman.  This isn’t Apocalypse Now.  But I don’t need that.  We’re not here for the script (very well crafted by Daniel Water and Samm Hamm on the story).  This is a Batman movie, make no mistake.  But first and foremost, this is a Tim Burton film.  And yes, I call this a film.  Not movie, film.

Being a huge fan of Batman you’d think I might dislike the movie.  Batman’s almost a supporting character, he doesn’t get to do much ‘detective work’ as it were.  He’s not the focus of the story.  He can be, we saw Christopher Nolan turn Batman into an actual leading man with Batman Begins.  And Batman works great as the lead, but sometimes he works best as the man in the shadows.  He is the ‘Dark’ Knight after all.

Michael Keaton plays the mysterious flying rodent.  Keaton’s an actor who has tragically fallen out of favor in Hollywood.  He needs a comeback like no other.  And I never think this more than when I watch him as Batman.  He’s perfect.  Christian Bale is one of the best actors working today, and he plays the hell out of Batman.  But the voice Bale uses in the Nolan films is so over the top it’s stupid.  He sounds like a grizzly bear choking on Clint Eastwood.  Keaton employs a simple whispered tone, it’s creepy, it’s bad ass and it works perfectly.

Michelle Pfeiffer plays Catwoman.  First, her costume.  Bob Ringwood and Mary Vogt designed an outfit that still amazes me.  It’s a latex catsuit with white stitching.  I noticed while last watching the movie that her gloves resembled the hands of the H.R. Giger creature from Alien. It’s so overtly sexual, it’s an S&M outfit, she even has a leather whip for God’s sake.  It boggles my mind that the character didn’t return in a Batman film based on the sexual nature alone.  But the performance matched the outfit.  The slinky nature or Pfeiffer’s movements are so perfect for the character.  And the voice is perfect as well, like a 1940s movie siren.  She’s such a faithful translation of the comic book character.  Why she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress is beyond me.

Finally, Danny DeVito as The Penguin.  In the comics the character is little more than a short guy with a cigarette, a tuxedo and long nose.  It’s comical.  Tim Burton’s Penguin is comical in the things he says.  Visually he’s one of the more frightening looking creatures.  Make-up geniuses Stan Winston along with Ve Niell, who helped bring Edward Scissorhands to life, created an Oscar nominated monster that you will never forget.  His pale skin, the black teeth, the dark circles around the eyes, the spindly greasy hair, the beak, it all adds up to the stuff of nightmares.  And DeVito chews it all up and spits out a terrific villain for the Dark Knight.

The movie is an art film as I see it.  It’s an art film with laughs and action.  The look of this movie is just stunning.  Never before or since have I seen black used so effectively as an actual color. Cinematographer Stefan Czapsky and the Production Designer Bo Welch were each robbed of Oscar nominations.  It’s such a monochromatic movie, like a black and white movie with some color thrown in.  There’s a brief moment where we see the Penguin sitting at a desk in a barren office.  The desk is golden where the room the gargoyle gray.  It’s a haunting painting to me.

A minor drawback to the visuals is the actual Gotham City set.  Whereas in the first film they clearly built a city for a movie, here it looks like a sound stage in certain scenes.  However there are moments where we see mate paintings of the cityscape that very much resemble the Gotham from the late designer Anton Furst (who sadly committed suicide before he could really do what he was meant to in film).

Of course you can’t talk about a Tim Burton movie without mentioning the always mesmerizing work of composer Danny Elfman.  In my favorite film score of his outside of The Nightmare Before Christmas he outdoes himself.  Returning to his signature Batman themes he adds several new pieces for each character.  It’s dreamlike, or rather nightmare-like.  Either way, it’s hard not to love the music in this film.

As much as I admire the movie as a Tim Burton fan, it’s still a Batman film.  And it’s the Batman moments I love the most.  The signal goes out, Bruce is sitting alone in his study, mirrors reflect the Bat signal into his window, covering the wall behind him.  It’s a great introduction to the movie.  But the best moments for me are the violent ones.  A fire breather burns a toy store, all the teddy bears lit ablaze (a very upsetting image for me).  Batman pulls up in the batmobile with 2 thugs on his hood.  He slams on the brakes sending the men into the burning store.  He then hits a switch then sends down a jack that enables the car to spin 180 degrees.  He then hits the flame exhaust to full and lights the fire breather up like the human torch.

Then a clown holds a woman hostage.  Batman fires his grapple gun into the wall behind him.  “You missed.”  Says the clown.  Batman then rips on the cable, pulling with the grapple a chunk of the building that knocks the clown out cold.

But my personal favorite has to be when he takes a bomb off someone.  A circus strongman tries to block Batman’s way.  “Go ahead and hit me.”  Batman lands a punch that doesn’t even make him budge.  We see Batman’s eyes look down.  The strongman sees that Batman has placed the bomb in the man’s belt.  Batman gives a wicked smile, and tosses the man to an explosive demise.  Perhaps breaking the cardinal rule of Batman swearing never to take a live, but who cares?  It’s bad-ass!

This is a sick movie.  When it was released there was some relative commotion over the extreme nature of the movie.  Writer Daniel Waters recalls seeing children crying as the end credits went up.  McDonald’s reciveved several complaints about The Penguin’s disgusting visage on their child’s happy meals.  As writer Samm Hamm put it, they were never trying to make a movie geared for children.  And that is why I love the movie.  It’s ambitious in it’s darkness.  It’s trying to be something other than a simple teenager’s action flick.  It’s a work of art akin to the films of Fritz Lang’s M.

While this is by no means a movie for everyone, in fact most people seem to have either forgotten the film in the wake of Nolan’s films or outright pan the film.  I have read most of Batman’s great graphic novels.  The darker the better.  I am a true fan of the Dark Knight and his adventures.  So with that I say that this is an unforgettable film.  I’ve been watching it since seeing it all those years ago in 1992.  And watching it in the fall of 2011 I know for certain that it is a personal classic that I will treasure and keep on my shelf right next to The Dark Knight.

A sick, twisted, perverse, gruesome, miserable exercise… and I’ve never had so much fun watching one!

Rating (out of 4 stars) – ****

Best Performance:

Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle/ Catwoman

Best Line:

Bruce Wayne: (Walking in the strret with Selina as Bruce sees an article with the headline “BATMAN BLOWS IT!”) “It’s not even accurate.  ‘Batman Blows It’?  He probably saved the city millions of dollars in property damage alone!”

Best Moment:

Penguin hits a swiutch thinking it will only fire his penguin’s rockets.  Not realizing that it has also been set by Batman to release several vicious bats attack him.  The bats send him screaming to the bottom of a shallow pool from 5 stories up.  A true Batman moment.