Good morniiiiiiiiiing, Eat More Comics! Hope you all had a dandy Thanksgiving and are recovering from your overeating and overexposure to relatives. We’re refining our early Christmas present for you — an Eat More Comics message board!! For now, take a trip back in time and think about the comic-book movie I just finished watching on TV on a lazy Sunday morning: Batman Forever.
Back in 1995, the third Batman movie came out — the fourth if you count the old Adam West movie (which I do). Gone were both the director and star of Batman and Batman Returns, as Tim Burton and Michael Keaton were replaced by Joel Schumaker and Val Kilmer, respectively.
People don’t seem to think much about Batman Forever. The Keaton/Burton movies are well-remembered for relaunching a franchise and for notable performances from Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Danny DeVito, and Christopher Walken. The fourth movie after the relaunch, Batman and Robin, with George Clooney as Batman, is also well remembered, albeit mostly for killing the franchise for nearly a decade before Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale brought it back. But Batman Forever gets lost in the shuffle a little bit. For my part, I used to remember it as a somewhat flawed but pretty decent movie. Of course, I hadn’t seen it since I was a kid.
Well, after watching the film for the first time in many years, I’ve changed my mind: it’s terrible. Really, it’s pretty awful. Still not as bad as Batman and Robin, but closer than you might think. Burton’s goal had been to create a darker vision of Batman; Schumaker’s goal seemed to be to put all the campiness and corniness back in. It’s rather astounding how many bad lines there are; even more impressive is how much bad acting there is.
The bad acting is especially bizarre because most the actors in the movie are very talented. Val Kilmer (Batman) has admittedly done several bad movies, but he was great in The Doors and especially Tombstone. Tommy Lee Jones (Two-Face) and Nicole Kidman (Dr. Chase Meridian, the love interest) have each won an Oscar. Chris O’Donnell (Robin) disappeared for a while, but he was good in The Chamber. And of course, there’s Jim Carrey (the Riddler), one of the most famous comedic actors of my generation, who has made his career largely by overacting and being generally goofy (for lack of a better word).
Yet not one of them really gives a *good* performance. I’m not sure any of them can be entirely blamed, either, given the script. Kilmer isn’t necessarily bad, but he comes across as too stiff and unemotional. Kidman’s character just seems so pointless that it’s hard for her to make anything out of the role. Jones arguably gives one of the worst acting performances of his career, but again, blame the plot for much of it: there’s zero depth to the terribly written Two-Face character, so Jones has to play him as just another lunatic psycho, which he pulls off poorly. O’Donnell isn’t bad at action or light-hearted moments, but when he tries for emotional reaction, he comes up empty.
And then there’s Carrey, who is both the best and worst part of the movie. At times, he tries way too hard, and his “antics” are hard to even watch. Other times, his … well, exuberant acting plays well into the craze of the Riddler, and he’s a quite enjoyable villain.
To be fair to Batman Forever, even the fairly highly regarded Burton/Keaton movies don’t hold up too well when viewed today. I watched Batman about a year ago, also for the first time in years, and what passed for “dark” in 1989 felt slightly lame today, especially compared to Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Batman Returns holds up a little better, but mostly because of Keaton, Pfeiffer, and Walken; DeVito and the Penguin are rather mediocre, in my opinion.
It’ll be interesting to see how Nolan’s third Bat film shakes out, especially because, by all accounts, he’ll use the Riddler. Coming off The Dark Knight, the second-highest grossing film of all time (and to most if not all of us, the greatest comic book movie ever), there will be a lot of pressure to live up to that success. Although the movie is definitely a “go,” it’s still being planned/written. From the last report I saw — an interview with Gary Oldman (Commissioner Gordon) — they hadn’t decided for sure whether to recast the Joker after Heath Ledger’s death, but it sounded like they were leaning toward leaving Joker out, probably a good choice. Since Ledger’s performance, which won him a posthumous Oscar, is widely regarded as the best villainous performance ever, there will also be a lot of pressure on whomever plays the Riddler — not to mention on Nolan and his co-writer, David S. Goyer, to write Riddler the right way.
And when they’re making those determinations, hopefully they’ll think about Batman Forever, which offers a few good, and a lot of bad, examples.
