Batman Forever (1995)
Dir. Joel
Schumacher
Warner Bros. Pictures
Rating: B- (B+ including
deleted scenes)
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| "Riddle me this, riddle me that...." |
Continuing on the subject of movies I watched a dozen times on VHS as a kid is 1995's Batman Forever. I unapologetically like this movie. I like all of the first four Batman films in their own unique ways. (First five if you count the Adam West one.) Hell, Batman '89 has been my favorite film for the last fifteen years of my life. Batman Forever is the flawed emerald of the series; it's pretty, it's gaudy, and in your mind's eye you love it for what it could be instead of what it is.
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The film follows Batman / Bruce Wayne (Val Kilmer) as he ineptly tries to apprehend the villain Two-Face / Harvey Dent (Tommy Lee Jones) who in turn spends the entire runtime ineptly trying to murder Batman for having failed to prevent the incident that turned him into a bifurcated neon pink freak. For some reason the writers chose to forego adapting the exceptional backstory these two share in the comics of being former allies and the deep seated guilt Bruce feels for having failed to prevent Harvey's marring by presenting it as barely touched upon background lore. Two-Face is one of the surprisingly few Batman villains (the others being the Penguin, Black Mask, and post-'Heart of Ice' Mr. Freeze) that actually works as a proper dramatic foil to Bruce Wayne and for some reason we're just not gonna take advantage of that here. Their loss.
Tommy Lee Jones, who'd make a great Two-Face if they were playing the character straight like almost every other adaptation does, somehow still manages to make a great Two-Face while having to play the character like a raving comedic lunatic. Accurate to the source material? Hell no. Entertaining in its own right? Very much so.
Bruce also has to deal with obsessive Wayne Enterprises employee turned tech startup guru Edward Nygma (Jim Carrey) who moonlights as The Riddler to enact his hyper-fixation on destroying Bruce Wayne after being snubbed by him during a routine factory inspection. Two-Face and The Riddler quickly team up to go on a crime spree to fund Nygma's startup company; a business partnership that turns out to be mutually beneficial when they learn that – shock of shocks – Bruce Wayne and Batman are in fact the same person. I do love it when supervillains pal around with one another like goobers.
Jim Carrey's acting is alright. Tolerable. It's neither as good as The Mask (1994) or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) nor is it as painful as The Cable Guy (1996) or Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) where you spend half the sit just wanting to smack him across his ridiculously angular canuckistanian head and tell him he should actually try hanging around human beings for a bit if he insists on pretending to be one for a living. There are a handful of moments where he goes too over-the-top but he mostly fits in with the comic book feel of the movie. I'm never gonna bash a comic book film for actually feeling like a comic book – I am a better man than Doug Walker is – but I will criticize Jim Carrey for being a nutjob who needs to tone it down. I dunno what kinda white boy designer drugs he was on during this period but he needed to halve his dosage.
For whatever reason Nygma is presented in this tale as an obsessed Bruce Wayne fanboy. A weird facet of the character that is carried over into The Batman (2022). I suppose it makes more sense for a one-off story than to have him be a rando puzzle / video game designer like in the comics and jump through the narrative hoops of explaining how exactly that ties into Bruce's personal life (Spoiler: it doesn't; not every supervillain needs to have one degree of separation to the hero, only the ones that actually matter).
The Riddler's villain origin in this movie always struck me as being a tamer version of the Mad Hatter's as shown in the exceptional Batman: TAS episode "Mad As A Hatter". Nerdy Wayne Enterprises employee with social issues who specializes in brain manipulation goes off the deep end when he's rejected and dons the costume of an established fictional character to go on a crazy spree. Yes, I said established fictional character. Between the bobble heads, statuettes, and creepy as all hell full sized animatronic that Nygma keeps in his apartment, it's safe to say the Riddler is a preexisting and recognizable character / mascot in this universe that Nygma simply appropriated the look of for his crimes. I actually kinda dig it. In typical fake smart guy fashion he's actually a performative loser who cannot come up with his own original ideas.
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| "eh-hehe-hehe!" |
Special passing mention should go to Nygma's obviously put-upon supervisor, Fred (Ed Begley Jr.), who perfectly sells the shame and embarrassment of having to wrangle Jim Carrey on a daily basis and may well be the best performed role in the movie despite his very small part. The poor man gets thrown out a window during Nygma's villain origin for his efforts.
In addition to all that, Batman meets up with abnormal psychologist Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman), who is horny on main for Bats and makes sure he knows it. This leads to a rather funny scene in which she tries to seduce Batman and Val Kilmer fails miserably trying to sell disinterest at Nicole Kidman circa 1994 feeling him up while wearing black negligee. It's like one of those softcore Twokinds Patreon exclusive scenes that Tom Fischbach posts to make his fans edge.
...not that I'd know anything about that.
Chase eventually enters the ol' superhero love triangle with Bruce Wayne and Batman. It gets to the point where Bats is fully willing to go to town on her while wearing the full rubber batsuit... only for her to ruin it by saying she's developed the feels for Bruce Wayne instead. Women. Getting cock blocked by yourself is a plot point that occurs surprisingly often in superhero media. Mary Jane Watson is the best love interest because she avoided this trope altogether by discovering Peter Parker's secret identity way back around, like, Amazing Spider-Man #6 and then couching that information for twenty years, including shooting down a marriage proposal from him in the seventies because dumbass Peter still hadn't told her he was Spider-Man yet.
I don't care if that was a retcon – it still counts.
I rather like how they use Dr. Chase Meridian in this movie even if she's not so much a character as a prop for Bruce's personal drama to play off of. Her surname is not incidental as she symbolically acts as the dividing line in the tug-of-war between the Bruce Wayne and Batman sides of Bruce's life: a totem that both parts of him covet but neither can have unless he can find a compromise between them. It's never stated outright in the series but the inability for him to be either Bruce Wayne or Batman to an adequate extent is implied to be why his relationships with Vicki Vale and Selina Kyle fell through in the gaps following the previous two movies. Chase even gifts Bruce a dream fetish doll – which of course is split right down the middle like Two-Face – sensing he might need a little smack on the ass to work through his mental issues. The doll doesn't play a direct role in the plot, but he does give it back to her at the end and states he won't need it going forwards.
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| She also keeps this around her room and is surprised when Bruce sees a bat in it. |
Caught in the crossfire of this typical Gotham nonsense is young-ish traveling circus trapeze artist Dick Grayson (Chris O'Donnell), who moves in with Bruce and his butler Alfred (Michael Gough) after Two-Face murders his family during a performance. Dick is a rather likable character despite the writing snarl of his ambiguous age – the character is written to be somewhere between fifteen and nineteen years old despite O'Donnell visibly being a grown-ass adult with sideburns and piercings in his mid-twenties, and that's not even getting into Grayson being twelve in the comics when his parents get aced.
Dick Grayson bonds with Alfred and Bruce pretty quickly but his pesky teenage(?) compulsions lead to him discovering the Batcave and joyriding the Batmobile, after which he demands that Bruce let him become his partner so he can wreak bloody vengeance upon Two-Face. They have a conversation about the cycle of vengeance; specifically how hollow it leaves you to kill a person who's killed your parents. This is obviously a holdover from when Keaton was supposed to reprise the role as this lacks any real dramatic punch if he hasn't deep-sixed Jack Napier already.
Dick Grayson's situation causes Bruce to flash back to the death of his parents at the hands of a young Jack Napier, pearls and all. The reminiscing carries along to his parents' wake where he comes across a red book and his eight year-old self reads it... and that's all the explanation we're ever gonna get for that. Even though it gets mentioned again when Bruce briefs Dr. Meridian on his parents being murdered in front of him. Almost like it's a very important element of the story that does not get resolved. In the theatrical cut, anyway.
Eventually everything comes to a head when Wayne Manor is assaulted, the Riddler destroys the Batcave, Chase is kidnapped (right after realizing Bruce is Batman) and Bruce Wayne gets SHOT IN THE FUCKING HEAD. In the theatrical cut this doesn't mean a damn thing as he kips up in the next scene totally fine but in the deleted scenes it's a totally different animal. In the proper version of the tale, this results in Bruce getting a temporary case of amnesia and Alfred jogging his memory by sending him into the caves underneath Wayne Manor. ONE OF THE BEST MOMENTS IN THE ENTIRE BATMAN FRANCHISE then occurs as therein he finds the red book he keeps seeing in his flashbacks – his father's journal – and reads it to discover he's been repressing the memory of having been the one to badger his parents to go see a movie the night of their murder, setting in motion the entire event. Bruce's memory comes flooding back to him as a metaphorical giant fucking animatronic bat arrives and stands face-to-face with him. Bruce mirrors its pose and symbolically merges the two sides of his personality – Bruce Wayne and Batman; not two separate entities sharing the same body but in fact one man with one goal. He then emerges from the cave and confidently tells Alfred that he knows who he is: he's Batman.
YEAH, I DUNNO WHY YOU'D CUT THAT OUT EITHER.
There is absolutely no excuse for them leaving the entire dramatic climax of the film on the cutting room floor despite keeping in all the buildup and post-script to it. That'd be like if someone made a Lord of the Rings film adaptation and left in all the foreshadowing to the Scouring of the Shire but then completely cut out the ending of the story because they spent too much time on the Battle of Helm's Deep instead, didn't even do it correctly, and only succeeded in fucking up the pacing in the process.
That's right – I'm calling you out, Ralph Bakshi.
Bruce, having settled his personal troubles, then willingly takes on Dick Grayson as his partner. Grayson adopts the nom de guerre Robin in reference to a touching story he tells Alfred about his parents. They then lay siege to Nygma's enormous laser powered blender looking fortress to save the day.
Despite spending the whole movie telling Dick that revenge is a fool's game, Batman reminds us all that this is supposed to be canon with the Tim Burton flicks when he outright murders Two-Face by throwing a handful of quarters at him while he's standing on a wet girder (that he's somehow managed to teleport eighty feet down a sheer metal elevator shaft within eight seconds to be on), causing him to fall screaming to his death on a pile of jagged rusted metal spikes eighty feet below. Robin initially reacts with shock at seeing Bruce blatantly go back on his word... but then he smiles. He's tasted blood for the first time. Homicides, as we all know, are like McNuggets – you'd kill to have more than just one.
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| "Oh yeah, I could totally get into this." |
There's a very nice narrative three beat – literally one of the oldest storytelling tricks out there – of dramatic handgrab saves; the first being Dick's father catching him during a trick at the circus, the second being Robin saving Batman from being buried alive (which doubles as an homage to Tim Drake's introduction story from the comics, “A Lonely Place of Dying”), and the third being Batman saving Robin from the deathtrap at the end of the film and symbolically taking the place of his father in the process. Planting. Reminder. Payoff. It sucks that I live in a day and age where this kinda basic narrative structure is impressive to see done correctly in a film, but oh well.
Nygma gets overdosed with brainwave energies as his giant Box explodes (giggity). As Batman approaches him he hallucinates the giant bat from Bruce's dreams swooping towards him. Completely bereft of proper context for this, Nygma shrieks like a bitch and has a total mental breakdown. Now that's how you pay off a motif, kids. The Riddler spends the rest of his days rotting in Arkham Asylum, Bruce gets a goodbye kiss from Chase, and we cut to credits on a nice little homage to the '60s Batman intro with Batman and Robin running towards the camera in silhouette.
FIN
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Gotham City in this story is a hellish cocktail of neon, dutch angles, art deco, and German expressionism in which the lightning is always inexplicable and even the lowliest of street toughs can afford top shelf leather drip and 2002 Jeff Hardy glowstick bodypaint. I love it. The titanic art deco inspired buildings and beautiful internal decors of the upper class business districts being offset with the '80s neon hellholes beneath them creates a beautiful styles clash that makes for great visual shorthand of this proud, powerful city decaying from the bottom up. In a move that I'm gonna chose to interpret as intentional, Nygma's nouveau riche status is communicated in a scene where he hosts an upper class fundraising shindig in the penthouse suite of one of these skyscrapers but gaudily chooses to adorn the room with the same kinda neon naff he lived in just a couple weeks prior while wearing a suit that's obviously the poor person's idea of what rich people dress like.
I know I'm in the minority when I say this is my favorite take on the setting in any medium.
In addition to that we've got some truly outlandish set and costume designs. They... mostly work. Special mention goes to the street gang of bodypaint enthusiasts, the silver action figure look of the second batsuit, and the goofy as hell Batmobile design which I know has its fans but to me, in the words of the prophet Chad Warden, it looks like a dildo.
Elliot Goldenthal produces a very good original score, which I associate with Batman almost as much as Danny Elfman's music. A perfect blend of campy big band nonsense and brooding atmosphere. While the score is great the soundtrack is gloriously schizophrenic and deserving of a future review in its own right. You've got Method Man and Nick Cave on the same album. Even I'm not crazy enough to square that circle. This is truly a snapshot of that bygone golden age where we Americans were culturally untouchable and knew neither fear nor shame.
I love this film more for what it could have been than what it was. Mix in the deleted scenes and give this script one more pass in the writing room to square up all the themes and tone and you'd be looking at a possible A-tier Batman movie. As it stands it's a victim of a bipolar desire to be both a deep dive into Bruce's psychosis and a campy, colorful popcorn flick. It almost makes it work. In fact, it's just this side of being unintentionally genius since duality's a major theme of the story itself, from the choice of villain down to the struggle the protagonist is going through trying to make sense of his two divergent careers. A happy accident. Sadly, the whole is more than the sum of its parts and the finished product doesn't quite stick the landing. It remains a flawed, if pretty gem.
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FAVORITE QUOTES
TWO-FACE: Fortune smiles. Another day of wine and roses – or in your case, beer and pizza!
BATMAN: [mildly offended] Bats aren't rodents, Dr. Meridian.
RIDDLER: [to Two-Face] Very few people are both a summer and a winter, but you pull it off nicely.
[Batman dramatically rises out of a deathtrap]
[deleted scene]
BRUCE: The night of my parents' wake, Alfred, I remember running... falling... the bat. There was something else... or was it just the bat? What was I running from? Is that all this is - a little boy being afraid of a monster in the dark?
BATMAN: [to Riddler] Release Chase. This is between you and me.
TWO-FACE: And me. [turns cheek] AND ME!
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