Rotten Tomatoes score: 80%
When I reviewed The Nightmare Before Christmas, I mentioned that Tim Burton had directed two other scary Christmas movies in the 1990s. This is one of them. (The other one is Edward Scissorhands. I wasn't trying to keep anybody in suspense.)
This is also one of those movies where I have no idea why it takes place at Christmas. It was released in June, and the fact that it's Christmas has nothing in particular to do with the plot. And supposedly it was very hot during production, so they had to have huge refrigerated trailers to keep the penguins safe.
Batman Returns, of course, is a sequel to 1989's Batman. But there's very little in terms of continuity. We have a new villain, a new love interest for Bruce Wayne, a new mayor of Gotham City, and even the city itself looks totally different. Apparently, an early script would have brought back Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent, whose absence is unexplained and disappointing. (I think they even wanted to set up Two-Face, which would have been a little much in this already complicated plot.) The same script also would have contained Robin, and I'm glad they thought better of that idea.
Instead of Two-Face, the ringleader of this jolly Yuletide adventure is Christopher Walken as Max Shreck (named after a famous silent film actor, not to be confused with the famous green ogre), a crooked industrialist who plots to install a puppet mayor to facilitate his fraudulent schemes. If I were writing such a story, I might make Shreck a securities fraudster, or maybe a price fixer—after all, the nature of his crime is irrelevant, since the story is really about the cover-up plot—but they went in a different direction. It turns out Shreck has built a power plant that secretly siphons electricity off the grid instead of generating it. I guess you just put it in reverse.
Evidence of Shreck's malfeasance is uncovered by the Penguin, a mysterious sewer-dweller who for some reason is also the boss of a crime syndicate called the Red Triangle Gang. Shreck and the Penguin reach a mutually agreeable solution whereby Shreck will help the Penguin transform from a shadowy weirdo into a mayoral candidate, and the Penguin, once elected, will be Shreck's loyal ally.
Meanwhile, Shreck's nervous, bashful executive secretary Selina Kyle has also learned about the power plant caper, so Shreck throws her out a high-rise window to her expected demise. Unbeknown to Shreck, Selina crashes through a series of conveniently situated awnings and survives the fall. While she lies stunned on the pavement, a swarm of cats gather around her and chew on her fingers. I have no idea what this is about, but it's the most disturbing cat-related scene I've ever witnessed, with the possible exception of this:
Apparently the finger-chewing gives Selina a new lease on life, and she emerges from the ordeal a fearless thrill-seeker. She miraculously transforms a vinyl jacket into enough yardage to form a full-body cat suit and embarks on an ill-defined quest for revenge against Shreck.
All of this mayhem inevitably catches the attention of Batman, who gets around to making a cameo appearance in his own movie so he can use wildly excessive force to defeat the Red Triangle Gang. He suspects that the Penguin and Shreck are behind the gang, but the rest of the city sympathizes with the Penguin, especially after he reveals that his wealthy parents cast him out upon the waters in a basket like Moses, and he was raised by penguins. (Why is there a flock of Penguins inhabiting Gotham City's cavernous, seemingly non-functional sewers?)
The plot goes on and on. Catwoman and the Penguin team up to defeat Batman, while Bruce Wayne simultaneously falls in love with Selina Kyle; the Penguin frames Batman for the murder of a beauty queen; Batman exposes the Penguin's criminal connections in time to spoil the election; the Penguin tries to take revenge by killing all the first-born children of Gotham—remember when they made kids' toys and McDonald's happy meal tie-ins to promote this movie?
Then there's an ending where Batman kills the Penguin and Catwoman kills Shreck, and then you think Catwoman's dead, and then there's a shot where you see that she's still alive. And then she didn't come back in any of the sequels, so I guess she's dead after all.
This movie was (justifiably) criticized for being too dark and frightening, but I've always liked that about it. That, of course, makes it even more bizarre that it takes place at Christmastime, but I think bizarre was the name of the game here. According to the making-of DVD features, Tim Burton was reluctant to make a Batman sequel until they gave him free rein to do whatever he wanted with it. He certainly exercised that prerogative—if it had been twenty years later, he would have cast Johnny Depp as Batman and Helena Bonham-Carter as Commissioner Gordon.
Longtime Batman fans were uncomfortable with some of the ways the movie deviates from the comics. They made the Penguin much scarier-looking and more psychopathic, but I don't begrudge them that artistic license. More controversial was the movie Batman's propensity for killing crooks. For some reason, that criticism is usually leveled at Batman Returns in particular, even though he was equally homicidal in the 1989 film.
The writers justified their scripts by saying that 1990s audiences would not accept a hero who ties criminals up and drops them off at city hall. Maybe not, but the Dark Knight series proved that a marginally kinder and gentler Caped Crusader is still accessible to today's jaded viewers. The pendulum seems to have swung the other way lately, as Ben Affleck's bloodthirsty, scruffy-looking, patently unhinged portrayal makes Michael Keaton's version look downright cuddly.
Tim Burton also argued that his darker and edgier Batman harked back to the early comic books of the 1930s, and I can't argue with that:
I have to admit, it's hard enough to root for a hero who dresses like a bat and beats up criminals in the middle of the night, and it doesn't make it any easier when he goes around setting clown-people on fire. Or shooting bad guys in their sleep.
Anyway, there's plenty to like in Batman Returns, from Danny Elfman's haunting music score, to Michelle Pfeiffer decapitating mannequins with a whip, to Pee-Wee Herman as the Penguin's father, to Danny DeVito biting a man's nose and eating an actual raw fish, for real, on camera.
What an iconic holiday image.
Well, I can't say this movie is underrated, because it was quite well-received in spite of its reputation for giving people nightmares. It's good, but
No comments:
Post a Comment