Bat-May: Batman Forever (1995)

In an interesting way, Batman Forever was foundational for me. It was the first Batman film I had seen in theaters and, in 1995, must have been among the first films I saw in theaters. (I was bitten in 1994 with The Lion King.) I had the poster on my wall, the action figures in my toybox, and the comic book adaptation in my collection. I lived and breathed it. It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

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.

 

Then we come to the villains. I have long maintained that the fundamental problem with Batman Forever is that both Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey are playing their characters as though they were Jack Nicholson’s Joker. I stand by this claim, because it certainly explains what keeps these performances from being truly faithful to the comics, but there are some nuances to draw out. It’s been widely reported that Jones and Carrey didn’t get along during filming, especially because Jones reportedly hated Carrey, telling him at one point, “I cannot sanction your buffoonery.” (True or not, has there been a more Tommy Lee Jones sentence than that?) Though to that point, I would have to ask Jones what he made of his own performance, because it is prancing buffoonery at its finest – again, precisely what the film needs of him, but it is a far cry from the more grounded Harvey Dent given us by Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight. But the cleverness of joining Bruce Wayne’s bifurcated psyche to a plot involving Two-Face is genius, and one wishes the screenplay had borne that out a little more directly. One also wishes that Jones had played his Two-Face a little more seriously; unlike Kilmer, whose first scene is a dud, Jones’s first scene is note-perfect as he monologues to a hostage bank guard about the universal fairness of luck.

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 Forever is rated PG-13 for “strong stylized action.” Directed by Joel Schumacher. Written by Lee Batchler, Janet Scott Batchler, and Akiva Goldsman. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Nicole Kidman, and Chris O’Donnell.

For more Bat-May action, the good folks at Collected Editions posted my review of Batman: The Movies, the comic book adaptation of the Batman Quadrilogy. Give them a click - no one reviews comics like Collected Editions!

Jason Bourne (2016)

Over the course of the past fourteen years, we’re five movies deep into the Bourne franchise, four of which have starred Matt Damon, with three of those directed by Paul Greengrass. I give you the numbers because Jason Bourne paints very close to them, tampering very little with what has worked in the past. Ultimately it’s a very enjoyable fifth outing, but at the same time it is the fifth time we’ve been down this road.

Once more a hidden secret emerges about the mysterious past of Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), sending him on a quest for answers. Placed in the crosshairs of the CIA director (Tommy Lee Jones) and his ambitious assistant (Alicia Vikander), Bourne crosses continents in order to uncover the truth about one last mystery surrounding the shadowy Treadstone project that gave birth to Bourne.

Both Damon and Greengrass took a film off, allowing Jeremy Renner to fill in for The Bourne Legacy, and so there’s an atmosphere of “back to your regularly scheduled programming” at play in Jason Bourne, right down to the back-to-basics title. I had said that the fourth one “may be my favorite of the Bourne films,” but to be perfectly honest I’m not certain I can distinguish among them in the mind palace of my memory. To be fair, I’ve seen a lot of movies in my day, but the Bourne movies have a way of running together for me.

They all seem to rely on a pretty transparent formula – Jason Bourne comes out of the cold, discovers a secret from his past, jet-sets across continents following leads gleaned from snippets of classified documents (one of which always takes him into a dense crowd where he has to duck surveillance), and confronts the gatekeeper of secrets at gunpoint, only to demonstrate he’s still not at peace, slinking off into the sunset. It’s theme and variation at its most reliable; I can’t say that I’ve been disappointed in the execution of a Bourne movie yet, this one included, but there’s also something to be said for the fact that it’s exactly the film promised by the trailers.

The action sequences are precisely as compelling as before, more so the further we get into the film. It gets better once the audience has a better handle on the mysteries of the film and as the direction of the plot becomes clearer. That is, once we know the stakes, Jason Bourne is about as good as a Bourne movie’s ever been. Damon is credible as ever in the role, a welcome return in spite of the ever-reliable Renner filling in last time around. Tommy Lee Jones is inspired as the craggy-faced CIA director; no one does dialogue about morality and greater-goods than Jones. And Vikander, in a role that’s probably built to extend into sequels (about which, more in a bit), is a credit, just suspicious enough for us to wish for a bigger role for her.

For two more hours of exciting action and espionage, Jason Bourne is about as good as it gets, competently presented but never too taxing. Throughout the film, though, nearly everyone tells Jason Bourne some version of, “You can’t keep doing this forever. You’ve got to do something else with your life,” and to that I’d have to say I agree wholeheartedly. If there’s going to be a sixth Bourne film, it’s got to move forward (perhaps bringing in Renner as Aaron Cross?) and show us something we haven’t seen from Bourne. It’s a bit like hearing Paul McCartney play “Hey Jude” for the fifth time in a row – we know it’s a great song and we know he plays the heck out of it, but what about “Get Back”?

Jason Bourne is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of violence and action, and brief strong language.” Car chases, explosions, gunfire, and stabbings comprise the violence, with some degree of blood.

The Grand Marvel Rewatch: Captain America: The First Avenger

Face front, true believers! Welcome to the next astonishing addition to “The Grand Marvel Rewatch,” designed to get us all sufficiently amped up for Captain America: Civil War, which comes out May 6, 2016. Each Wednesday, The Cinema King casts his eye back upon the twelve films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and offers five salient observations about the caliber of the films and the way they might play into Marvel’s latest installment in America’s favorite franchise.

Today’s fantastic feature film takes us to 2011 for Captain America: The First Avenger, for some good old-fashioned Nazi-punching.

1. One small step for a man... There’s a surprising sense of scope in this film that never lets us forget that Steve Rogers is just one man in a much larger war, a much bigger conflict that spans all the way back to Thor (note the shared appearance of Yggdrasil, the World-Tree) and much further forward (see #2). And can we just say – what a man! (No, I’m not referring to his pecs, at least not exclusively.) Chris Evans is spot-on as the old-fashioned Steve Rogers, and I love that the movie never laughs at him for his antiquated notions about the world. Instead, he embodies an ideal of heroism that of which our world and his could frankly do with a little bit more.
2. One giant leap for Marvel-kind. As small as the film’s focus tries to be, it downright explodes the Marvel Universe and perhaps might hold the record for most spin-off material. It introduces Hydra and the Tesseract, who persist in the MCU to this day; it gave us Howard Stark and Peggy Carter, who’ve had their own show; and it brings us full-force into The Avengers. I’m almost prepared to say that Captain America: The First Avenger is the most important film thus far in the MCU, insofar as it’s introduced a lot of important elements that haven’t left the franchise.
3. Raiders of the lost tesseract. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is at its best when it’s mashing up genres with the superhero genre like Guardians as a space opera or Winter Soldier as a 70s conspiracy thriller. But The First Avenger does that twice over: it’s a superhero film, which is also a WW2 film, which is also an elaborate Indiana Jones reference. In fact, it’s somewhere between Raiders of the Lost Ark and director Joe Johnston’s second film, The Rocketeer (which you know I love). High adventure mixed with war exploits, it adds up to popcorn cinema, as in the best it is.
4. Such a waste, such a terrible waste! The First Avenger is really entertaining cinema, but it’s a real shame that it’s a world that we can never really revisit. With Cap (spoilers?) frozen at the film’s end and thawed out in the present day, we’ve pretty much resolved Cap’s arc with Peggy and the Howling Commandoes. While most of the supporting cast has surfaced over on Agent Carter, we’ve gotten a little bit of continuity on the WW2 era of the MCU, but Hayley Atwell is such a marvelous performer (no pun intended) that she deserves more big-screen heroics. Ditto for Stanley Tucci, who’s absolutely perfect as Dr. Erskine, but he’s shuffled off fairly quickly, meaning we don’t get to see more of this great screen presence. And don’t get me started on Tommy Lee Jones, who a) I always forget is in this movie, and b) gets the best line of the film with “I’m not kissing you!”
5. Many happy returns. There’s a beat in Thor where Loki lies about Odin being dead, but The First Avenger amps that up by three when it kickstarts the MCU’s refusal to kill most characters permanently. You have Bucky Barnes, who’ll turn out not to be dead; Arnim Zola, who’ll turn out not to be dead; and of course Captain America, who turns out not to be dead. It’s an old comic book cliché, of course, so might we wonder whether we’ll see the Red Skull at some point in the future? Hugo Weaving is not shy about his reticence to return to the role, but if ever a character could be recast it’s this one. Call it “the War Machine precedent” (in being replaced, would we say Weaving got Terrenced? or Cheadled?). In fact, his apparent demise at the hands of the Tesseract, a known Infinity Stone, makes an Infinity War return all the more plausible.

There’s so much more to be said about Captain America: The First Avenger, so be sure to check out my original review. Join me in the Grand Marvel Rewatch over the coming weeks, and hit the comments to share your thoughts about the MCU. And don’t forget to tune in next Wednesday for the next installment, in which we take a closer look at the big one, 2012’s The Avengers. Excelsior!

Lincoln (2012)

Four score and two years ago, Walter Huston starred as Abraham Lincoln in the D. W. Griffith biopic of the Sixteenth President, the first “significant” portrayal of the man on film.  Here in 2012, we have another – Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, ably helmed by Daniel Day-Lewis.

Lincoln subverts the normal biopic pattern by beginning with the President (Daniel Day-Lewis) on the eve of his second term.  Allied with Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) and Congressional Republican Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), Lincoln presses to pass the Thirteenth Amendment before a negotiated peace with the Confederacy would maintain slavery as part of the terms of surrender.

In a sense, Lincoln is more civics lesson than characteristically Spielberg film, with the director backing off his signature style in favor of a more subdued experience that puts the actors fully in charge of translating the political maneuvering.  It’s a wise choice, especially with a cast as gifted as this one.  Day-Lewis is unsurprisingly engrossing as Lincoln, disappearing behind the gaunt cheekbones and stovepipe hat with a voice that recalls a timid Daniel Plainview.  To paraphrase Cornel West, “Do not be afraid to say Oscar!”  Day-Lewis’s totalizing performance is the stuff Academy Awards are made of; he’s practically a lock for a nomination, and a third Oscar for his mantel wouldn’t be a surprise.

The perfection of Day-Lewis’s performance is no surprise; when I heard that Liam Neeson had left the project, I was dejected only until hearing who would be replacing him.  But what’s more surprising is the plethora of familiar – and talented – faces rounding out one of the best ensemble casts in history.  Strathairn handles well the friendship with Lincoln, one of mutual respect tempered by political disagreement.  Jones is the true scene stealer here, inspired casting for an aging curmudgeon with a proclivity for verbose condemnation.  Though Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln is the weak link, Spielberg wisely restricts her to only a few scenes.

But the film is populated with veteran character actors, each of whom does wonderful and memorable work with only a few minutes of screen time.  James Spader, John Hawkes, and Tim Blake Nelson play rabble-rousers courting Congressional votes, while Jackie Earle Haley appears as the Confederate vice-president.  There’s Hal Holbrook as an influential Republican, Walton Goggins (best known as Boyd on Justified) as a hesitant Ohio representative, and Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant.  It’s almost enough just to list these folks, because you know the kind of work that they do; it’s as exceptional and entertaining as it’s always been.

What the film doesn’t do particularly well is tell us who Lincoln was.  The performance is entirely enthralling, with Day-Lewis giving it more than his all (as he always does).  But the film relies almost too much on Lincoln’s legend, taking for granted our reverent regard for him.  We never really get much access to Lincoln the man, with almost every scene feeling like a performance; in this particular month, Lincoln was the master strategist, playing each side and timing each move to achieve his goal.  It’s compelling and probably more honest than most whitewashing historians are willing to acknowledge, confronting the performativity of politics without bowing entirely to the “Great Man” simplification.  But it’s a bit of a cop-out when Lincoln refuses to tell his wife’s dressmaker what he really thinks about slavery, as if the movie doesn’t want to press too hard against our canonization of Honest Abe.  The truth is here somewhere – it’s likely that this Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union first without sacrificing his moral convictions against slavery, but the film never goes there, instead allowing this Lincoln to remain inscrutable.

But for this moment of historical disingenuousness, Lincoln is a marvelously gripping film, a certain Oscar contender on the other side of 2013.  It’s a showcase for an actor at the top of his game, a museum exhibit populated by an array of talented moving parts, and a Spielberg film that doesn’t hit you over the head with base sentimentality.  A film this talky ought to be a snoozefest, but the performances are lively and the politics accessible – a bit like The Wire at its most viewer-friendly.

Lincoln is rated PG-13 “for an intense scene of war violence, some images of carnage and brief strong language.”  The film begins with a brutal war scene, and there are several visits to battlefields strewn with bodies and dismembered parts, though these scenes are by far in the minority.  A few period-era profanities occur, but this is more Yosemite Sam than Deadwood.

Don’t forget to check back tomorrow for our Thanksgiving surprise!

Men in Black III (2012)

I’m going to jump right in and say that Men in Black III is much better than it ought to be, although it’s still a long way from being the best MIB flick in the trilogy (I’d have to go back and reassess the first two, though I’m reasonably certain the first is still king).

In this third MIB film, the “aliens among us” premise is mostly jettisoned in favor of a more character-driven exploration of the relationship between Agent J (Will Smith) and his gruff senior partner Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones).  After the nefarious Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) escapes from a lunar prison and time-travels to murder K, J – the only one who remembers his partner – timejumps back to 1969 and pairs with a young K (a pitch-perfect Josh Brolin) to prevent Boris’s plan from succeeding.

When the threequel was announced, I remember rolling my eyes with some skepticism at the apparent lack of originality running through Hollywood that they would dust off a property more than a decade older.  But thanks to my recent addiction to Doctor Who and Grant Morrison comics, the time travel conceit sounded promising.  And after being oh so wrong about a certain casting choice in a certain blockbuster Batman film, I’ve adopted a “cautiously optimistic” stance toward most Hollywood ventures.

“Cautious optimism” pays off here, because Men in Black III is entertaining and a good bit of light-hearted fun.  Forgive the comparison, but it’s no Avengers in terms of summer blockbuster greats, but it’s better than most threequels (see this week’s “Monday at the Movies” feature for more) and takes the franchise in an intriguing new direction.

Although Will Smith’s performance seems a little dated, Josh Brolin ably steps in for Tommy Lee Jones and does a more than convincing job of playing the younger version (with a few “city miles” to account for the apparent lack of sufficient age discrepancy).  Rather than a straight impersonation, Brolin is charged with creating a peppier Agent K, to boot, and it’s something he does successfully, creating a character that is at once familiar and unexpected.  If for no other reason, then, the film is worth seeing for Brolin’s performance.

Also in the “good performances” catalog – Jemaine Clement, late of Flight of the Conchords, as antagonist Boris the Animal.  After musical partner Bret McKenzie won an Oscar for his work on The Muppets, Clement also takes the comedy route but dials up the menace significantly.  Gratefully, Clement doesn’t turn Boris into a caricature of a villain but embraces the character’s nature and revels in it.  Boris isn’t a villain we laugh at but rather can genuinely fear.

While the performances make the film worth the price of admission, I can’t help wishing the script was a little stronger.  The script was apparently cobbled together from several drafts and left a bit unfinished; consequently, there are a few narrative plot threads that never quite come to fruition.  Maybe I’m just reading too deeply into the movie, or maybe I’m falling for the alternate timelines which at least one character posits are in existence..  (And here it’ll be impossible to discuss the film without at least spoiling what doesn’t happen.)

The beginning of the film seems to intimate that K is dying; he’s more depressed than usual, even before he learns that Boris has escaped and is gunning for him.  He’s clearly keeping a secret from J, although the alleged payoff doesn’t quite measure up to the teases we get (nor do we know why now of all times the secret is bothering him).  Narrative problems surround K; we’re promised that we’ll learn why the happy-go-lucky K of the 60s transformed into the crotchety oldster we know and love, yet the continual hints of “It hasn’t happened yet” remain ephemeral evaporations at the end.  It ultimately has nothing to do with Cape Canaveral, nor with his relationship with Agent O (another thread that never pays off) – at worst, the writers are teasing it for Men in Black IV, a sign of poor writing.

Worse, up until the last minute, it seems that the writers are going to kill J.  Repeatedly he’s asked how far he’ll go to save K; we’re told that he’s “been there” before; the rules of time travel apparently stipulate that a death must be replaced by another death; and it’d make perfect sense for K to be bitter that his partner’s death saved his own life.  Ultimately, though, the writers seem unwilling to pull the trigger (no pun intended) on J.  The inclination to sustain the franchise is understandable, but copping out on the ending results in a film which signifies nothing.

But in the words of Captain Jack Sparrow, “It’s not the destination so much as the journey.”  Men in Black III is a fun ride and a satisfactory summer popcorn flick, so long as there’s a bit of disbelief suspended.

Men in Black III is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi action violence, and brief suggestive content.”  Aliens menace our heroes and each other; one shoots spikes out of his hand and impales several characters, while most others are vaporized in colorful bursts of energy.  Boris has a weird henchwoman who’s wearing a slightly revealing outfit when she makes out with his elongated tongue, and police guards comment briefly on her attire.