Thousands of years after the high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) was condemned to an eternity of suffering, librarian Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) and her treasure-seeking brother Jonathan (John Hannah) hire adventurer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) to lead them to the fabled lost city of Hamunaptra. Beneath the sands of Hamunaptra, though, the mummified Imhotep sleeps, and this band of explorers will soon learn that what awaits them is something other than buried treasure – and infinitely worse than death.
I’ve long made the joke that The Mummy may as well be called Indiana Jones and the Curse of Hamunaptra. With a similar pace, setting, atmosphere, and attitude, The Mummy needs only a few cosmetic tweaks to sneak its way into the Indiana Jones franchise for good. Brendan Fraser is heroically fun as our cocky swashbuckling protagonist, a kind of early “fortune and glory” iteration of the good Dr. Jones. He’s got the self-aware sarcasm down pat, yet he can flip to sincerity with a well-timed smolder. In short, Fraser is the key to the movie allowing us to have fun – he’s very clearly enjoying himself, too. Like Fraser, the movie is a master of its own tone, zany and madcap at one turn, cavalier and daring at the next, without losing any of its own integrity. The movie might poke fun at itself, but it never makes a fool of its audience.
Fraser is the perfect model for what’s going on with The Mummy because the film overall is never boring. If it’s not being funny, it’s ably building tension or hosting a rollicking action sequence, helped in no small part by Jerry Goldsmith’s rousing score. As the old meme goes, Jerry Goldsmith didn’t have to go so hard, but he did that – he did that for all of us. Goldsmith’s orchestral work soars, dabbles in the romantic, and plays around in the Arabesque; it works perfectly in the film, and it’s a darned good listen outside of the cinema, too. Longtime readers of the blog know that a good score is often my favorite thing about a movie, and you can get away with a lot if the music is doing its work right. Goldsmith is trying to do an uncomplicated arrangement a la Old Hollywood, but his use of motifs and swirling patterns mean this score isn’t one to ignore. (And yes, I was listening to the score as I wrote this review. How could you tell?)
Among the rest of the cast, everyone is doing their level best to make this world believable, and they do succeed. Weisz and Hannah are divinely cast as bickering siblings – somewhat broadly caricatured, it’s true, but their devotion to the clichés make these characters feel real. Arnold Vosloo, meanwhile, has a real presence as Imhotep, and though he doesn’t say much he’s expressively sinister in the scenes when he has all his skin; when he’s in ‘monster mode,’ Imhotep is creepy and ghastly to behold, which is all the better when the movie needs that quick jolt of terror that only a decaying corpse can deliver.
Then there’s the smaller supporting roles, a veritable who’s-who of late-90s character actors. Oded Fehr (who, incidentally, played a terrorist on Sleeper Cell while Vosloo played one on 24) is tons of fun as the dead-serious protector of Hamunaptra, while Kevin J. O’Connor is equally a blast in the role of servile weasel Beni, handily a top goon in the annals of monster movies. And don’t sleep on Erick Avari, indisputably the fin-de-siècle king of “Hey, it’s that guy!”, in the thankless role of fez-wearing museum curator Dr. Bey (not to be confused with Fehr’s Ardeth Bay); in mummy movies, there’s always a guy with a fez, and there’s always a shady museum curator, so Avari is the pristine cherry on top of a perfect sundae.
One of the things I’ve always loved about The Mummy isn’t quite apparent in the film itself, though it’s equally impossible to ignore. In 1999, The Mummy comes at the tail end of a decade of period pulp films, which is precisely my favorite flavor of cinematic ice cream. I’m thinking of films like Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow, and The Phantom – all of which I loved as a child and still do as an adult. We can enroll Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman in this pattern, and indeed we might even consider it the progenitor of a host of imitations to follow. At the climax of the decade, The Mummy is arguably the most successful of these period pulps, though I’ll always have an elemental soft spot for The Rocketeer. I’m a sucker for this kind of heightened reality, placed into a distinct historical past, without postmodern cynicism or deliberate genre subversion. Take a story and a time period, and revel in it; that’s what The Mummy does best of all.
I say “nominally more faithful,” because from frame one, Coppola’s Dracula veers wildly from the source material by reimagining the legendary vampire as a Byronic antihero, cursed by his dark past and searching for the reincarnation of his lost love in the person of Mina Murray (Winona Ryder). Alas for the Count, Mina is already engaged to solicitor Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), and so Dracula’s journey to England becomes less a real estate game and more an amorous quest that just so happens to involve a little bloodletting.
Plainly put, Oldman acts rings around everyone else in the cast, even the delightfully hammy Anthony Hopkins as Abraham Van Helsing. Oldman plays Dracula in no fewer than four different iterations, and he aces all of them. Bela Lugosi was iconic, but he seems one-note in comparison to Oldman’s more sophisticated portrayal of a vampire who is alternately tortured and torturer, a lusty bedfellow and a carnivorous lover. The image of Oldman never quite supplants Lugosi, however, proof positive of just how primordial the 1931 original remains, yet Oldman’s “Old Dracula” is a close second as he defies the laws of physics, suckles at shaving razors, and commands your attention in a riveting first act.
That opening third of the film, in which Count Dracula holds Harker hostage in his castle, is the best the film ever gets, a note-perfect introduction to an adaptation that never quite lives up to its own beginning. The opening is so compelling, in fact, that you’ll almost forget that Keanu Reeves is madly out of his depth as a young British solicitor, encumbered by the worst British accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins (and perhaps even worse, given that his greeting of “Count Dracula” sounds more like “Count Chocula”). So good is Oldman, and so spooky is his castle, that Coppola might well have stopped the film there and turned in the best short film about Dracula.
After Dracula leaves Transylvania, however, the film slows to a crawl in its depiction of Dracula as romantic foil. Oldman is often too psychotic for the work of courtship, and it’s frequently unclear whether Mina is truly falling for Dracula or whether she’s laboring under his hypnosis, his absinthe, or both. Meanwhile, the film spends a great deal of time with Lucy Westenra (Sadie Frost), her three suitors (Richard E. Grant, Cary Elwes, and Billy Campbell), and Van Helsing, such that it feels like Coppola wasn’t quite sure which film he wanted to make – the star-crossed lovers or the paranormal medical mystery. Of the two, the latter is more compelling, but it never bears Coppola’s full attention.
What’s very clear, however, is that Coppola wanted to make one of the most erotic Draculas ever, filling the film with copious nudity and literalized subtext. In doing so, however, much of the tension of the film becomes inert. To borrow an unfortunately apt line from Alfred Hitchcock, the terror is not in the bang but in the anticipation; the sensuousness of Lugosi’s Dracula was all subterranean, where Oldman’s Dracula is, in the biblical sense of the word, openly ravishing. It’s an interesting forerunner to the Twilight films, of all things, with a doomed immortal languishing as an unabashed romantic, but its erotic dimension is so overblown, so baroque, that it becomes fairly ridiculous.
Coppola’s direction, too, is sumptuous and ornate. Often Coppola is attempting to ape the filmic style of Old Hollywood, with dramatic fades and creative camera angles that would make Orson Welles blush with envy. It’s for those reasons, Coppola’s fiendish attention to classical styling, that the film’s exaggerated sexuality and violence end up distracting rather than amplifying. When Dracula licks the shaving razor that nicks Harker’s throat, it’s icky but spontaneous, yet when the vampiric Lucy vomits blood onto Van Helsing’s face, it’s nauseating for all the wrong reasons.
By dubbing the film “Bram Stoker’s” Dracula, there’s an immediate claim to authenticity, an appeal to authority that suggests this is the definitive adaptation of the novel. Hokey reincarnation notwithstanding, Coppola may have succeeded in spite of himself. The film replicates the novel’s obsession with emerging technology, particularly its intersection with the epistolary mode of storytelling, and the script has a keen interest in Stoker’s most likely inspiration, Vlad the Impaler. And Keanu Reeves aside, this Dracula stars as good a cast as any (including the woefully underrated Tom Waits as the sniveling Renfield). Yet Bram Stoker’s Dracula tries so hard to be grown up that it loses some of the power of suggestion. Lugosi could say more with a discreet bow than Oldman says by leaping into bed with his prey.
Put another way, Oldman is no Lugosi, but it’s worth it to watch him try. Gliding across the carpet and whirling a titanic sword, his Dracula is buckets of bloody fun.
And it’s also worth saying that, Catwoman (2004) aside, Batman & Robin changed the way that Hollywood treats superhero movies. Kevin Feige has said as much, and it’s certainly true that you don’t get an earnest Marvel Cinematic Universe without X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002) looking at Batman & Robin as the wrong way to do things. It is, they say, always darkest before the dawn, and in this case Batman & Robin is a very dark night indeed, a film that, at best, has nothing to say beyond reveling in the most arch camp imaginable – and, at worst, exists only to sell merchandise.
Gotham City has a new menace – Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger), whose diamond heists have plagued the city while he tries to cure his wife’s terminal illness. Batman (George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O’Donnell) suit up to save Gotham from a deep freeze when the villainous Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) and Alfred’s young niece Barbara (Alicia Silverstone) come to town, each ready to give the Dynamic Duo their own unique brand of headaches.
It may go without saying at this point – and perhaps it should – but I like movies. I like to enjoy movies. I don’t take a lot of pleasure in deliberately watching bad movies, nor am I often content to dislike a movie. As we saw last week, I’m almost always looking for some redemptive reading of a film, some kernel of potential or some recognition that the film accomplishes its own goals. I try not to judge a film based on how I would or would not have made it. If something in a film doesn’t work, I usually try to figure out why, instead of dismissing the film out of hand. So believe me when I say that I want to like Batman & Robin. It stars my favorite fictional character of all time, and it’s got actors who are really good in other films. The best I can say about Batman & Robin, though, is that it’s really hard to look away. With all the reasons I should enjoy this movie, I kept asking myself what wasn’t working. What did this film do wrong?
The answer, I think, is very simple. Batman & Robin has nothing to say. It combines the camp “crime doesn’t pay” attitude of Batman ’66 with the “look at this, look at that” mentality of a toy commercial. For all its faults, Batman Forever at least had some narrative integrity; it made some degree of sense to include Two-Face in a movie about psychological duality, with The Riddler as a kind of emergent repressed persona. Framing Robin as the redemption of Batman’s self-imposed curse, too, fits into the unified whole of the screenplay. (It’s the delivery that doesn’t work, but we talked about that last week.) Batman & Robin, on the other hand, is a collection of bits that don’t relate to each other at all; there may be a loose thread of family between the addition of Batgirl, Mr. Freeze’s love for his wife, and Poison Ivy’s demi-adoption of Bane – but that so-called theme never rises above the level of “Some people have families.”
Where Batman Forever – and indeed the preceding three Batman films – picked its villains because of their relationship to the central theme of the film, Batman & Robin seems to have chosen its antagonists based on who was unused but popular all the same. For context: Mr. Freeze had recently been reborn, thanks to Batman: The Animated Series; Poison Ivy was too sensuous to be included on Batman ’66; and Bane was a recent addition to the rogues gallery after a top-selling comics storyline in the early 1990s. They have nothing to do with each other, and the film doesn’t even play with the incongruity of a frozen villain teaming up with the embodiment of lush, verdant life. Worse, it neuters the character of Bane, strips him of his intellect and fighting prowess, and reduces himself to a grunting accessory. (Thank heavens for Tom Hardy.)
Clooney, meanwhile, inherits the mantle of the Bat and has been of two minds about the role. On the one hand, it catapulted him from television’s ER into the role of Hollywood’s top leading man; on the other hand, the film is abysmal, and he’s admittedly not very good in the role. He plays an adequate enough Bruce Wayne, but he’s missing the nuance that Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer brought to the role. Clooney’s Bruce is all genuine, a civic-minded billionaire who’s less playboy and more socialite. (There’s also a very compelling argument to be made for a reading of this Bruce Wayne as gay, which the film probes not at all but which seems inescapable, particularly in the moment when Bruce hems and haws at the notion of marrying a lady.) I’ve long remembered Clooney as a commendable Bruce Wayne, but this time around, I think “passable” is the kindest word for the performance. As Batman, though, he’s nearly no good at all, stiff and unconvincing, with his only standout moments coming in his interactions with Robin.
On the subject of Robin, Chris O’Donnell remains strangely cast, playing the role as emotionally stunted, prone to outbursts of jealousy and impotent fury. One does wonder why this fully grown adult, bristling at his partner’s mentorship, still hangs around the Batcave at all. He has so little to do in the film that he’s barely referred to by name throughout much of the dialogue; by the time his name is spoken aloud for the first time, one almost forgets his name is “Dick,” assuming instead that Bruce has chosen that moment to resort to bratty name-calling. And then we come to Alicia Silverstone, who is so wildly out of her depth with a thankless role in a script that gives her nothing much to do at all. Indeed, one wonders why Batgirl is in this film at all; she arrives on the doorstep of Wayne Manor unbidden, with no real purpose for coming to town, and with no incentive to become a superhero other than the fact that her uncle Alfred has, inexplicably, taken the liberty of designing a molded rubber suit for her to wear.
As Alfred, Michael Gough is commendable, the only one of the cast who’s doing any acting at all. While the rest of the cast is competing to overact past each other, Gough is giving a delightfully restrained performance, deeply affecting and emotionally tender. The film’s decision to afflict poor Alfred with a nebulous medical condition notwithstanding, the genius Gough takes that opportunity to present Alfred as concealing his symptoms from his charges, halfway between the British stiff upper lip and a father’s fear that he will leave his children unable to care for themselves. Throughout the “Batman Quadrilogy,” as it’s come to be called, Gough has been one of the only steady unifying presences, and in this film you truly see why.
But the question of Alfred’s illness raises a larger point about the way the screenplay is put together. Batman & Robin is a series of MacGuffins and Chekhov’s Guns where plot elements only exist in the first half to come up in the second half, yet when these things resurface it’s without any logic or purpose. Bruce Wayne’s colossal telescope is only in the film to be used by Mr. Freeze in the climax (where it behaves like a telescope doesn’t); likewise, Alfred’s diagnosis with “MacGregor’s Syndrome” is only included so that he can get better. In the same vein, Barbara is introduced only so that she can become Batgirl – but why? There’s no narrative or thematic purpose for Batgirl in this story, and the only conclusion I can draw is that she’s been included to sell toys. And I can say that because I bought the action figure. I bought a lot of the action figures from this film.
Maybe there’s beauty in that, creating a superhero narrative to give children more fodder for their imaginative (and actual) toyboxes. But Batman & Robin is not a children’s movie in the way that, say, The Phantom Menace – a similarly “toyetic” film – was. There’s no place for children in this innuendo-laden film (I don’t even think there is a child in the film!). It’s more than just a cartoon come to life; Batman & Robin may as well be a children’s playground reenactment of a cartoon. You may see some redemptive beauty in that idea, but to me it seems sad to think that this film and these characters were cobbled together carelessly, with concern only for how these likenesses could be merchandised. It’s a sad fact of the comic book industry writ large, that unique site where art meets commerce, but after having seen some of the best films starring Batman, this one feels soulless.
In that sense, that cold and emotionless cynicism of chasing valuables, perhaps Mr. Freeze is the perfect villain after all.
Time’s gone on, and it hasn’t been kind to Joel Schumacher, who picked up the directorial reins from Tim Burton and put his own avant-garde camp stamp on the franchise. For many years, fans used Schumacher as a punching bag to defend their own aggressively macho, insistently grown-up takes on Batman. Whatever Batman is, the argument went (and I admit I was in that crowd for many years), Batman Forever wasn’t it. Now that I’m older and wiser, I know that Batman can be everything at once – the genius of the character is that he is at once immutable and simultaneously infinitely adaptable. He fits into any genre, and still he persists. And I’m pleased to see that the fans are coming around to this perspective with Batman Forever, which has undergone a kind of cult reclamation such that cries of “Release the Snyder Cut” have, now fulfilled, been followed by “Release the Schumacher Cut,” which promises a longer and darker version of Forever.
Only I don’t know that it’s necessary. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll happily watch a three-hour Batman Forever, but I’m not convinced that it’s what Schumacher wanted. My sense of Batman Forever is that Schumacher intended to update the Batman ’66 format with an inflection of the Tim Burton aesthetic, and on that count – even if I don’t love it – I have to admit he made exactly the movie he set out to make. It’s silly, it’s daft, and it’s over-the-top, but it’s also got an undercurrent of psychological complexity that gets lost in the static of Schumacher bashing.
Val Kilmer dons the cape and cowl as a Bruce Wayne haunted by the death of his parents and what he sees as a disturbing reprise when acrobat Dick Grayson (Chris O’Donnell) is orphaned by Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones). While Bruce attempts to dissuade his newfound ward from vengeance, Batman is facing a new adversary in the form of The Riddler (Jim Carrey), secretly a disgruntled employee of WayneTech who has developed a mind-control device.
Batman Forever begins, rather unfortunately, with a joke that falls very flat. Alfred (the stalwart Michael Gough) offers Batman dinner before his nightly vigil; after a strangely long pause, Batman says, in a reedy squawk, “I’ll get drive-thru.” It’s perhaps an effective table setting – we’re in for a Batman that’s cornier and more prone to one-liners, even if they don’t always work – but I suppose it’s also an indicator of how much worse the film could have been if every scene had this tone, if nothing was taken seriously. It’s also an unfortunate opener because it sells Val Kilmer short; neither the voice nor the mannerisms are quite right in this first scene, but Kilmer gets it right almost immediately thereafter. His Bruce Wayne is psychologically broken, emotionally dead, but he embodies a key interpretative theory of the character – that Bruce Wayne cannot be both happy and Batman. Instead, Kilmer finds a cold middle ground, which might read as disaffected – but isn’t that what the Bruce Wayne persona should be? Isn’t Bruce an airheaded satire on the notion of a billionaire playboy?
The only times we start to see the real Bruce Wayne – the damaged orphan boy, stunted by his parents’ murder – is in his scenes with psychologist and lover Dr. Chase Meridian, which is honestly one of the all-time great fictional names ever. Now raise your hand if you’d forgotten that Nicole Kidman was in a Batman film. (I myself forget every so often.) Her performance vamps a little bit – nowhere near what Uma Thurman would do in Batman & Robin two years later – but Kidman is pretty effective as a Jungian femme fatale. Though the film is a bit condescending with her inability to decide whether she loves Batman or Bruce Wayne, this motif of duality plays into the film’s larger investment in Bruce Wayne’s fractured psyche. Michael Keaton’s Batman recognized the disconnect between his own romantic fulfillment and his vow to avenge his parents; Chase Meridian helps Bruce to draw out the fact that he is utterly incapable of functioning as a human being while fighting crime as Batman.
Indeed, Bruce Wayne is fundamentally unable to connect with his new ward, Dick Grayson, until he unites his own twin personas, ultimately accepting the young lad as his crimefighting partner, Robin. I have no idea how old this incarnation of Dick Grayson is supposed to be; he must be under 18, for Bruce to take him in as a foster father, but Chris O’Donnell plays him like a brash mid-20s, and there’s something in that performance that doesn’t quite work. He’s hot-headed like the second comics Robin, Jason Todd, and his Dick Grayson has a dated youthful edge that perhaps hasn’t aged well. (The contemporaneous animated series took a similar tack with Robin, but it seemed to work better there.) It might be the weakest performance in the film, because it’s not quite dialed into what this film needs of a Robin; his mood swings and impetuous plans to murder Two-Face never really connect with the audience.
As for Jim Carrey’s Riddler, it is a Jim Carrey performance from the mid-90s, largely indistinguishable from the rest (costuming aside). It’s that same manic oscillation, bounding and mugging. There’s a hearty helping of Nicholson in there somewhere, but the performance is perhaps more properly an amalgam of Frank Gorshin and Max Headroom – which may indeed be the Rosetta Stone for Carrey’s whole career. Carrey’s Riddler is overdone, his riddles aren’t great, but at least his chemistry with Two-Face is commendable, particularly if the off-set animosity was as feverish as it seems. His Riddler is gleefully vain, too, applied more to his appearance than to his genius, and there’s something in his envy of Bruce Wayne that gets echoed in Sam Rockwell’s begrudging RDJ-worship in Iron Man 2. These days, though, I’m particularly intrigued to see what Paul Dano brings to the role in The Batman, with his Zodiac-killer take wildly distinct from the gleeful tricksters we’ve seen thus far.
Batman Forever is filled with performances and setpieces that are watchable for their spectacle, and I practically inhaled a bowl of popcorn during the film’s bombastic first act. It’s an energy that never really lets up, but the script is full of things that happen only because the movie needs them to happen. Two-Face has no master plan, striving only to kill Batman in a disconnected string of death traps (more shades of Batman ’66), while the Riddler’s mind-control plot is both too outlandish and much too easy to foil. One can easily see why a seven-year-old Cinema King would have been enamored of this cartoon come to life, but there is a kernel of something greater in here that keeps the adult coming back – occasionally against my better judgment, but compelled all the same. There is something very savvy about Batman Forever, and one wishes the film had leaned harder into that aspect of the story rather than the neon pop-art comic book come to life (which was, after all, what Schumacher intended). Perhaps there ought to be a Schumacher Cut, after all.
Batman Returns is the story of three freaks – The Bat (Michael Keaton), The Cat (Michelle Pfeiffer), and The Penguin (Danny DeVito). After the events of the first film, Batman spends his nights waiting for action, silently anticipating the call to fight crime. Amid an invasion of circus clowns, The Penguin arrives from the sewers, pleading with Gotham for an opportunity to learn the truth about why his parents abandoned him. Meanwhile, exhausted secretary Selina Kyle is defenestrated and murdered by her boss (Christopher Walken), only to be reincarnated with nine lives, a feline fixation, and a Shakespearean desire for revenge.
Just like I can’t say when I first saw Batman Returns, I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen it, but on this latest viewing I was largely unprepared for just how weird this movie gets. I have always maintained that the difference between Burton’s two Batman movies is that Batman is a Batman movie directed by Tim Burton, while Batman Returns is a Tim Burton movie (co‑)starring Batman. The difference is so apparent in this one; the Gotham sets are freakishly Burton, all odd angles and grim shadows, and Returns doubles-down on its predecessor’s premise that freaks beget freaks, with a brooding meditation on how these freaks find their place in a hostile society (they retreat, or they rebel).
In short, Batman Returns is so idiosyncratically Burton that it is impossible to imagine a major franchise film – a sequel, no less – surrendering so entirely to its auteur’s vision that the titular hero ends up being subsumed by the villains. (Today, the claim is usually the reverse, that the villains are largely indistinguishable when the movies are governed by the large personalities of franchise heroes. Can you name, for example, the three villains of the Iron Man franchise?) Indeed, Burton is much more fascinated by the monstrous Penguin and the sideways-feminist Catwoman (“I am Catwoman – hear me roar”), with Batman relegated to a largely supporting role in a film that is nominally his. Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is heroic mainly in that he has sublimated his freakish impulses and wears a mask of normalcy, which Penguin is unable to do while Catwoman is entirely unwilling. In a standout sequence, Bruce and Selina attend a masked ball sans disguise, underscoring that their civilian identities are the costumes. (It’s an image that has been appropriated forever since, with a notable reprise in The Dark Knight Rises.) Penguin, meanwhile, crashes the party, as DeVito crashes the film itself, all shouts and gurgles, bile and bodysuits.
It's clear, however, that Burton’s sympathies lie with the villains. The film begins with the birth of Oswald Cobblepot, ultimately cast into a river for his monstrous appearance; despite the fact that the infant Oswald is clearly dangerous, murdering and devouring the family cat, Burton manages to find pathos in this act of attempted filicide. Likewise, at film’s end, Burton stages Penguin’s final scene as high tragedy, with oversized penguins waddling in what appears to be an impromptu funeral procession. In much the same vein that Batman (1989) belonged to Jack Nicholson’s Joker, Batman Returns is paced as if it’s Selina Kyle’s film. Selina gets a full origin story and ends up in a sort of inverted will-they-won’t-they, akin to Bruce’s arc with Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) from Batman. Again, Burton feels more sympathy for Selina than he does for the curiously submissive Batman, evidenced by an elegiac sequence where Selina relives the trauma of her murder and proceeds to dismantle her entire apartment in a fugue of rage.
I mentioned Danny Elfman, and he’s one of the main reasons this film succeeds. A good score can buoy any film, and while his Batman Returns score isn’t as bombastic or iconic as his work on Batman, it works really well by being dialed into exactly the movie Tim Burton wants to make. It’s traditionally superheroic when it needs to be (in those rare moments that Batman is doing hero work), but more often than not it’s playing in a strange realm of uncomfortable tragedy. His descending Penguin theme grows more and more militaristic, balanced as it is by the aforementioned carnival music. His Catwoman theme, on the other hand, plays like a tragic music box, swirling like his Edward Scissorhands work while highlighting the tragedy of Selina’s fall from innocence and her attempts to claw her way back toward peace.
Batman Returns is a film of beauty and of pain, in distinctly Burton ratios, but it is also a film almost as broadly painted as Batman ’66. Walken plays Max Shreck like a boogeyman, right down to the electrified hairdo, while DeVito’s Penguin is a thing of perverse revolting fascination, gruesome and grotesque in equal measure. Burbling black-green bile and groping every woman he finds, it is nearly impossible to find the tragic sympathy Burton feels for this grunting, snarling antagonist, who is handily the most revolting Batman foe ever committed to film. And yet, there is something expertly calibrated about Burton’s Gotham; as exquisitely eccentric as Burton’s vision may be, his Gotham seems very much of a piece with the comic book depiction. Gotham is a city of unending crime and corruption, of perpetual peril. Despite the mayor’s objections, a marauding gang of killer clowns seems to go hand-in-hand with Gotham City as a whole, particularly given the intimation that the clowns constitute a kind of haunting courtesy of Nicholson’s Joker. It’s almost a chicken-and-egg situation, where it’s unclear whether the comics birthed Burton or if Burton’s shadow warped the comics in his wake. (I’ll go out on a limb and venture the latter, though it’s equally Frank Miller’s fault.)
When I drew up the Personal Canon in 2016, there was no question that Batman belonged on it. That movie was nigh elemental in my love of superhero narratives. But Batman Returns was always the weird younger brother, the one who went away to art school and came back a changed man. I was never all the way comfortable with it, but neither could I relinquish it entirely. It’s always had a weird pull, especially as distinct from the twin day-glo Schumacher films; it was, before Christopher Nolan, what Batman movies ought to be.
For those who play the role long enough, there’s a Rule of
Three for Bond actors, suggesting that the performer’s third outing is his
best. Sean Connery’s got a perfect film
in Goldfinger, Roger Moore has The Spy Who Loved Me, and Daniel Craig
has the knockout Skyfall. We’re at Pierce Brosnan’s third with The World Is Not Enough, which turns out
to be the exception to the Rule of Three.
It is far and away Brosnan’s most boring outing with only a few
redeeming features.
The obvious pun in any review of Tomorrow Never Dies would be, “Well, gosh, why won’t it just
die?” And for a decades-old franchise
that’s up to eighteen official entries, that might seem appropriate. Tomorrow
Never Dies is not a terminally ill film, though it does suffer from a very
bad case of head-scratching villainy and a distinct identity crisis.
