Movies in 2015:

Review: Batman Forever (1996)

So yeah, I saw Batman Forever.

It sucked.

Now, I will say that I can't EXACTLY blame Schumacher for completely fucking up the Batman francise. Trust me, most of Schumacher's other works (such as The Lost Boys, Falling Down and several House of Cards episodes) is far, far darker and mature then this strange, overblown film. Apparently, due to the (in my mind justified) backlash experienced against Burton's Batman Returns, Warner Bros. chickened out and forced Schumacher's hand in creating a far cheesier, far tackier thing than Tim Burton ever did. Batman Returns might have been excessive, disturbing and even gross at times, but it was never TACKY. Batman Forever on the other hand, is TACKY. The colors are garish and a blinding high contrast neon, the camera stumbles and shambles around as if it went to a bar and drank all the vodka, and the story is confused and obviously brutally edited from a far more comprehensible and insightful whole. It doesn't help that the pacing is horrific, once more doing the incredibly frustrating hopscotch between too fast and too slow, and the screenplay is frustratingly reaching for interesting and cool ideas, only to get sucked into it's own need to fulfill the desired amounts of tacky and out of place humor that plagued the Schumacher films.

Of course, Warner Bros. brass wasn't the one who ultimately looked at the dailies and said 'yes, I will put this shot in my movie'. That was Schumacher, and even if he wanted to make a darker product, the responsibility and ability to say yes to Warner Bros. mandates was firmly his own, and therefore I still blame him. He could have easily said 'I'm sorry, but I can't make this movie the way you want and still be satisfied', and walked off the project. It would have at least kept his dignity and honor.

The acting is also pretty uneven. Val Kilmer seems to be on Xanax for the entire film, and Bruce's character arc is muddled and vague. There are hints at a possibly rich and interesting arc about Bruce coming to terms with his duality, but that's completely buried in an avalanche of clumsy writing, bad dialogue and Kilmer's dead eyed performance.

Nicole Kidman's character feels horrifically pointless, as her obsession with Batman isn't fully explained beyond a vague hint at both sexual and academic attraction (but mostly sexual). Her acting isn't all that good either, which is a crime, since Kidman is one of the best actresses out there. However, her character betrays her, and is just a breathy, Marilyn Monroe styled woman who flaunts herself shamelessly towards Batman. It's a betrayal to both psychologists AND women, and it feels shamelessly like an attempt to get horny men into the seats of the theater with the promises of vanilla sex that never actually happens, which only makes it more pointless.

Jim Carrey as Edward Nygma is actually not that bad, it's just, again, he's given a character with nothing to grab onto and anchor himself. And it's not that Carrey is a bad actor, far from it. His work on The Truman Show, Man on the Moon and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have firmly cemented his dramatic cred, and his work in The Mask, Liar Liar and even Dumb and Dumber have shown he's got a comedic gift as well. I do feel that, given a better, more focused script, and better direction, Carrey could have honestly done the Riddler justice. However, instead of that, we got a wild, almost self-parody styled performance out of Carrey. I'll go and say it's better then Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face, since an argument can be made that Carrey is emulating Frank Groshin's work in the 1960s Batman. Not that it makes it any less annoying.

Speaking of Tommy Lee Jones, he apparently openly admitted to giving no effort in taking the film or the character seriously, and shows. Honestly his performance as Two-Face is a joke, being a mad cackling buffoon, instead of the tragic, complex villain of the comics and Nolan's trilogy. He's obviously not even TRYING to invest himself, being content to simply duke Carrey out into who'll eat the most scenery as fast as possible.

Chris O'Donnell actually though, surprised me with how well he played Robin. Now, granted this version of Dick Grayson has more in common with Jason Todd, but his acting was pretty good, and I didn't feel like he was phoning it in. However, like all the other performances, it's castrated by the screenplay and direction, which subvert any earnestness by the choppy editing and unnecessary cheese factor.

The story feels too complex, with Two-Face, Riddler, Robin, Batman and Chase Meridian all collecting screen time. The villain plot, a confusing attempt to acquire knowledge through a brain draining machine, is something more like a Hugo Strange plot then a Riddler plot. In fact, given that we have a psychologist trying to bed Bruce AND being obsessed with the psychology of Batman, wouldn't it have worked better that Kidman's character was the puppet master, using the Riddler and Two-Face as pawns in her own game to get into Bruce's head and expose him, and completely break him as a man by dragging up his repressed memories of his parents deaths? That would have been interesting, but nope, Kidman's just here for cheesecake.

Now, I'll admit that the soundtrack of songs was unexpectedly good, mostly fitting into the film an ironic way. The U2 song is pretty damn cool, what with the snarling, menace of their work on Achtung Baby being filtered through the hyper stylized feel the film claws at, but never reached. The song reaches it however. Goldenthal's score, however, doesn't quite have the spark or character that Elfman's work had for the franchise, but again, I chalk that up to studio mandated cheese factor then Goldenthal's lack of skill. On the contrary, Goldenthal has done INCREDIBLE film scoring work, often in a far more cerebral, dissonant way then his work on this film. Maybe he was just wise to what kind of film this was, and scored it accordingly.

But yeah, in the end, any good ideas the film has (The Riddler and Robin both wishing to emulate Batman and Bruce, the exploration of the duality of Batman and what makes him tick), are destroyed by the rest of the film, which is confused, garish and over the top, and not in the horrific so bad, it's good way that Batman and Robin was or in the fever dream styled way that Batman Returns was.

I'm giving one star, since it's an unfocused film with vast potential squandered with it's horrible screenplay and completely uncontrolled acting that scatters about the film like so many pieces of buckshot out of a shot gun barrel.