Back in September I wrote an In Defence
of... article for Batman & Robin (1997). Don't get me
wrong, the movie is freakin' stupid but it has a certain dumb appeal
to it. But 1995's Batman Forever is the real deal. It sucks
and it doesn't even have the so-bad-it's-good factor working for it.
It's simply bad with very few enjoyable elements to it.
Imagine yourself in the theatre
watching this in 1995. Perhaps you just rewatched the first two
Batman films to get in the mood. You're fresh off those Tim Burton
films' dark, moody tone and gloomy atmosphere. Then all of a sudden
this Joel Schumacher mess throws you into a world of flamboyant
campiness. Forever doesn't mesh at all with the preceding two
films. In fact, it more closely resembles an episode of the 1960's TV
show, but it's even more cartoony than that! There are bright neon
colours everywhere, the music is bombastic, and everything looks very
– I dunno – plastic, as if the film was made specifically to sell
toys (which may not be far from the truth). Gotham City is no longer
a gritty and grey metropolis, but now a flashy, lit up place with
massive statues of naked folks that would make Las Vegas blush, all
done in very fake-looking CG effects by the way.
People often ridicule Batman &
Robin for the bat-ass shot and the bat-nipples, but these blights
to cinema were actually introduced to the series in Batman Forever
along with tons of lame jokes to
make the kids laugh. We get jokes about how “chicks love the car
[batmobile]” and going to get drive thru whilst in the batmobile.
There's also a scene where Robin uses karate to... do his laundry.
So let's talk about
the characters, starting with the titular hero. In my opinion Val
Kilmer is the blandest actor to play Batman on film. He's pretty
wooden and he often looks uninterested in what he's taking part in.
On the total opposite end of the enthusiasm spectrum is Jim Carrey
playing the roll of... let's face it: Jim Carrey. Ok, he's actually
the Riddler but he does the whole Jim Carrey bit: making silly faces
at the camera, talking in silly voices, basically just being a big
manic man-child. His appearance is at times weird. In the climatic
final battle he wears a sparkly leotard and has a ludicrous haircut.
(On the film's poster he's doing this pose that I didn't know was
possible in real life. His hands are palms-out at his shoulders, but
his elbows are together. Can anyone here do that?) It's little wonder
that Tommy Lee Jones, as the other villain Two-Face, didn't get along
with Carrey during the filming. There's also the fact that he's
Tommy Lee freakin' Jones! Why was he here? Instead of a tragic
and interesting look at fallen white knight Harvey Dent, we're
instead given just Joker lite whose goals in this film are a total
enigma. He seems to be just a laughy, jokey dude who wants to kill
Batman, I guess. Lastly, I have to mention Nicole Kidman as Dr. Chase
Meridian, the main love interest. Her character goes beyond weird;
she's just straight up horny for Batman. Dr. Meridian's got fetishes
that makes me wonder if her character came from some teenager's
fanfiction.
The
saddest thing is that Batman Forever
tried elevating itself above its own campy tone by pitting it against
a serious introspective tone, as one of the main plotlines concerns
the psychology of Bruce Wayne and his duality in also being Batman.
Or something like that; needless to say the two tones don't fit
together very well. And yes, this involves a long drawn-out scene in
which we see the origin of Batman once again (which was already shown
to us in 1989's Batman).
And no crappy movie
is complete without a bunch of plotholes, right? For example, why are
there trick-or-treaters at the Wayne mansion? Thought his mansion was
out in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by iron fences and gates.
Why is the password to the office-to-batcave pneumatic tube chair
“chair”? It seems like a password that's very easy to
guess/accidentally say; it's not that much different from making your
computer password “password”. How did the Riddler get his flashy
not-so-secret base built without anyone discovering his secret
identity? Oh yeah, and Batman kills Two-Face at the end, which is
peculiar since I thought he made a point about not killing people.
But then again, he killed some dudes in the Burton films, so who
knows?
Of all the original
quadrilogy Batman films (that series really needs an official name),
this is the one I've watched the least simply because it's the least
enjoyable. It's quite obvious that this instalment was meant to dumb
things down to make it more easily digestible for a wider audience.
So what we were left with was a frustratingly kid-friendly movie that
didn't really break any new ground for the Batman series, unless you
count campiness and stupid jokes which, honestly, Batman &
Robin went further with and did more memorably. And when Batman
& Robin isn't the worst film in the series, there's something
seriously wrong.
But at least Batman
Forever gave the world the Batman thumbs up gif. Right?
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