IMDb plot summary: When a corrupt businessman and the grotesque Penguin plot to take control of Gotham City, only Batman can stop them, while the Catwoman has her own agenda.
Directed by Tim Burton. Starring Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Christopher Walken.
Like most franchise movies, it's fairly difficult for me to evaluate this on its own as a partial story, much less to distinguish it from other movies in the series, but I think this is a pretty good one. It's definitely got a fun and distinct Tim Burton vibe to it, and the Danny Elfman score is great. Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is my favorite part of the movie, though. She's got this amazing tragic arc that made me care about her in a way I didn't care about anyone else, and it made me far, far more interested in Catwoman as a character than I'd ever been before. Good flick, still going to confuse it with other Batman movies.
3 stars.
How it entered my Flickchart:
Batman Returns > Snakes on a Plane
Batman Returns < Zootopia
Batman Returns < A Matter of Life and Death
Batman Returns > Marathon
Batman Returns > Laura
Batman Returns > Inside Llewyn Davis
Batman Returns > Journey to the Center of the Earth
Batman Returns < Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Batman Returns > Stage Fright (2014)
Batman Returns < Star Trek: Generations
Final spot: #1012 out of 2659.
1 comment:
It's interesting that you should make the point about the Batman movies being interchangeable, as one of the key points Tim Burton had in mind when Warner asked him to come back after Batman was that this series should be an anthology, with no real continuity from one to the next. I've come to see Batman as a sort of German Expressionist film (seriously throw it in with M and Nosferatu some time!). Batman Returns is too slick for those aesthetics, though I still haven't worked out just what critter it is.
Totally agree about Pfeiffer's Selina Kyle/Catwoman. She's a genuinely interesting character with surprising depth and complexity. Watching the film in 1992 as a 13 year old boy, I took away the message that this was the kind of damage we often inflict on girls and women. I felt awful for Selina, and I was highly conscious that, while most women don't wind up becoming masked vigilante-vandal-thieves with an alter ego, it is all but routine for them to be overwhelmed by the pervasive abuse from being belittled at work to treated as a consumer in need of covering up her deficiencies by a telemarketer, and even put down by her own mother for being single.
On the other side is Danny DeVito's Penguin, and I hate him. Mind you, it's not that the character is vulgar or offensive that I hate; villains can be interesting and even likable despite being horrific, after all. It's DeVito's performance. Even when he has clever dialogue, he takes...so much time...to spit out...each...part...that by time he's done...I've forgotten...why...it would have been...funny. (And who seriously thought having him in that padded gray outfit for so much of the film was a good idea? It looks like DeVito forgot to stop in wardrobe on his way to the set and they just went with it.)
This was also the perfect time in his career to cast Christopher Walken. He was a bit bland as the villain Zorin in A View to a Kill seven years earlier, and not too long after Batman Returns, he more or less cemented the persona he's brought to everything since, verging on self-parody at times along the way. But his Max Shreck isn't quirky or over the top the way he'd have been had Walken played him just a few years later. He's grounded, and he's all the more ruthless and intimidating because of it.
Regarding Elfman's score, I don't love it the way I love his Batman work, but it may be a better Elfman score, if that makes sense. The addition of the choral singing is a distinctly Elfman touch that was absent in the first movie's music. There's a lot more zaniness overall, really, but there are also some genuinely solemn and touching pieces along the way. It's a delightful score all around, really.
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