Batman & Robin (1997)

"This is why Superman works alone!”

Oh dear. What an absolutely terrible film. Incoherent, full of meaningless bangs and explosions, and with ridiculous overacting from Schwarzenegger and Thurman in particular, and a bafflingly miscast George Clooney who plays Batman as a generic superhero of the sort you simply can’t imagine beating up criminals for information like he used to when he was Michael Keaton.

Indeed, Clooney seems to be channelling Adam West as a goody-goody Batman but with absolutely none of the camp humour that was the whole point. And, after largely ditching Tim Burton’s moody darkness reflective of the ‘80s comics, this film drops it entirely. We may have the same Alfred and the same Jim Gordon, but this is otherwise unrecognisable from those distant-seeming Tim Burton days.

The whole thing is just cartoonish and silly. Arnie hams it up as Mr Freeze (always a rubbish villain) from the start, and those constant terrible puns completely erase any possible pathos that could potentially be supplied by his motivation to cure his wife. But even worse is the appallingly silly performance from Thurman, an otherwise talented actress, who completely sends up the character of Poison Ivy, although of course the script does that anyway. Bane is wasted as a generic henchman and Jason Woodrow just gets to be a generic mad scientist to twirl his moustache for a bit and get killed. The whole movie is a tick box exercise of featuring various characters for the sake of it and just wasting them.

Perhaps the worst case of this is Barbara Gordon, although for some reason here she’s Alfred’s niece instead of Jim’s daughter- she unexpectedly turns up from England without telling anyone, for some reason wearing her school uniform, and claims to be English although Alicia Silverstone isn’t bothering with the accent. And then plot convenience let’s her discover the Batcave and a costume that Alfred made for her on the off-chance(!), and she duffs up Poison Ivy in spite of having no apparent combat experience or athletic prowess. This is all just very silly.

And I haven’t even mentioned THOSE nipples, and the scenes with Batman and Robin bidding in the millions for Poison Ivy. Can we just end the franchise now? Oh.

Batman Forever (1995)

“It's the car, right? Chicks love it."

 Incredibly, I've never seen this until now, after 23 years.After the two gritty Tim Burton films, which I'd seen at the cinema and enjoyed, I wasn't impressed by the prospect of a film that dialled down the atmosphere and just tried to tell an exciting story.

So did I enjoy it? Well, yes, it's a fairly good Hollywood blockbuster action film, and it's even pretty good with the Batman mythos- we get a pretty good Robin origin with the Flying Graysons and the character is made not to look silly, which is no small achievement, even if the fact that the Flying Graysons all wear costumes while performing that Dick's eventual Robin costume will pretty much mirror means that it's pretty obvious who Robin really is, so Bruce's secret is shot too. But then, in this film at least, it pretty much is anyway.

I also like both Tommy Lee Jones' performance as Two-Face and the fact they only did his origin in flashback. But the Riddler, well, Jim Carrey is really annoying and the riddles are a bit perfunctory, the character seemingly being really about those silly brainwave machine thingies; this doesn't really feel like the Riddler.

Also, Joel Schumacher's directorial style is so very generic Hollywood compared to Tim Burton's unique and very fitting style, and even Gotham itself suddenly looks just like an ersatz New York, complete with Statue of Liberty, rather than the Gothic, Expressionist nightmare we've become used to. This is connected to the first two films only by Pat Hingle, Michael Gough, and the design of all of Batman's stuff. And Brude actually gets a girlfriend and still has her when the film ends- what's going on?

Plus Val Kilmer is, if not awful, not great either, and not a patch on Michael Keaton. This just isn't the same introverted, brooding character. But then this isn't really part of the same series of films in any meaningful sense. It's pure Hollywood spectacle, done well but with no real depth or meaning.

Batman Returns (1992)

"I'm tired of wearing masks."

I haven't seen this since 1992, at the old Cannon cinema in Hinckley. I don't much remember what I thought of it then, but I like it a lot now. It doesn't quite beat its predecessor for me (sorry, Nick!)- it doesn't quite have the depth, visual elegance or Batman screentime- but Tim Burton leaves the franchise with two superb films under his utility belt.

Batman’s lack of screen time here is a surprise- Batman and Bruce Wayne are little more than a plot function here, with Michael Keaton not given much interesting stuff to do, especially as compared with the first film. But then we must remember that this isn’t primarily a franchise film but a Tim Burton film; the film is about the Penguin and Catwoman.

Interestingly, though, neither of the two traditional villains are wholly evil; that accolade goes to the splendidly named Max Shrek, a corrupt and morally depraved businessman whose Nosferatu-inspired name fits well with the film’s aesthetic for Gotham. He’s the catalyst for Catwoman. Selina Kyle, a downtrodden and humiliated secretary, single, alone and browbeaten by all and sundry, finds out stuff she shouldn’t and is thrown out of a high window, losing the first of her nine lives, and something snaps. At first it looks as though there’s a bit of a feminist message here, especially as Catwoman’s first outing is to rescue a woman from a man in a dark alley, but this doesn’t go anywhere. Still, Michelle Pfeiffer is pretty good and the kinky latex costume and whip looks cool- although it sort of takes over from the whole cat thing. Still, an impressive treatment of the character.

The treatment of Danny DeVito’s Penguin is much more radical; this Oswald Cobblepot grew up in the sewers, abandoned, and the only cigarette holder to be seen is that of his father, glimpsed early on. The umbrellas and monocle are present and correct, but this is a much more feral Penguin, no angel but genuinely vulnerable, and bordering even on likeable if he were not so lecherous.

These characters are fascinating, and what the film  is about, much more so than Batman or even Gotham. This is notably much more of a Tim Burton film and less of a Batman film than its predecessor, and the respective values you place on those two categories will probably decide which of the two you prefer. Personally, I may like this one less but it is nonetheless superb.

Batman (1989)

"Where does he get those wonderful toys?”

In one sense, and one sense only, this film parallels 1978’s Superman; both of DC’s flagship heroes, in spite of a long and varied Hollywood past, celebrated their fiftieth anniversaries with a whopping big, and rather successful, Hollywood blockbuster. But there the similarities end, because this is a Tim Burton film. And Tim Burton is far more interesting than Hollywood blockbusters.

It’s worth stepping back, though; 1989 was a long time ago, and I was only 12 when I saw this at my local Cannon cinema. But the popular perception of Batman was at best ambiguous, and largely coloured by the magnificent but very singular Adam West TV series, at that time being constantly repeated on UK television. And, after all, the dark, ‘80s version of Batman had only existed for a small percentage of the character’s fifty year history. After an admittedly dark, but very pulp introduction in 1939, it didn’t take long for Batman to morph into decades of Dick Sprang square-jawed straight heroism, which remained in place until the late 1960s. And even the 1970s “Darknight Detective” was very different from the darker 1980s tales of Frank Miller and Alan Grant. This film was, more or less, the introduction of this darker Batman to a wider public.

Tim Burton is, therefore, an inspired choice. This isn’t the Tim Burton we thing of today, of course; all whimsy CGI, a certain style, Helena Bonham Carter and a pre-meltdown Johnny Depp. No; it’s only 1989, and he’s not even done Edward Scissorhands yet. Nevertheless, Burton has a thing for design, and for Gotham it matters. Anton Furst’s cityscape is in some ways the real star of the film, a dark Art Deco. Even the retro fashions- men wear hats with their suits, evoking old gangster films- enhance the atmosphere. Michael Keaton is a deliberate statement as casting choice. And Kack Nicholson is magnificent in exactly the way you’d expect. Kim Basinger is good enough to obscure the fact that the character of Vicki Vale is only there as a token piece of prominent oestrogen in what would otherwise be a sausage fest, and Michael Gough is a fine, grandfatherly Alfred.

Perhaps the fight choreography is a little lacking, but in a film that looks this good and is so well-conceived that’s a minor touch; I can forgive Burton for not being an action film director. And it’s interesting that this Batman relies far more on gadgets than any great physical athleticism. Far more even than usual it makes you wonder why everyone doesn’t know that Bruce Wayne is Batman; after all, he’s the only person in Gotham who can afford all that stuff.

That aside, though, this film is easily as good as I remember it and, in the way it really-presented the character, arguably the most important Batman feature film.