James Bond Intro Credits (1962 - 2021)

 

James Bond. Intros. Music.

I like 'em. You like 'em. Most of 'em are decent. Let's get to it.

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Dr. No (1962)
Dir. Terence Young
'James Bond theme' & 'Three Blind Mice' by Monty Norman & John Barry

Intro kinda sucks. The SF on the barrel zoom is funny. Really disjointed. 'Three Blind Mice' is unintentionally hilarious. Barry's Bond theme is iconic but it's overused in this movie. The looped version used in this intro does it no favors. Doesn't really count as a Bond intro since we're in the proto stages but what the hell.

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From Russia With Love (1963)
Dir. Terence Young
'From Russia With Love theme' (orchestral) by John Barry

Exact vibe as the books. Low tech but brilliant. Sleaze masquerading as elegance; encapsulatory of the book version of the Bond character. Wish more of the films in the series took a cue from this one. Excellent orchestral arrangement by John Barry. One of my favorite takes on the Bond theme.

I'm dead certain Connery himself requested this.

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Goldfinger (1964)
Dir. Guy Hamilton
'Goldfinger' by Shirley Bassey & John Barry

Same trick as the previous film but done to much greater effect. Because the canvas upon which the images are projected are dead broads caked in gold dust suggestively posed like horror mannequins. Genius. Solid tune and excellent vocal performance by Dame Bassey. Really memorable images such as the golf ball rolling into the cleavage, the gun barrel angling out of the eye, and Goldfinger's big stupid head literally superimposed over golden fingers. Great stuff all around. Only complaint - and this is in no way a point against the intro - is that the aforementioned dead golden broads should be naked. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. I'm not even being perverted; it would just straight up be a better visual. I know there's no way in hell we'd have ever gotten that in a mainstream Hollywood movie in 1964 but this is why the mind is the best theater of all.

Aside from Royal Albert Hall. That place is gorgeous.

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Thunderball (1965)
Dir. Terence Young
'Thunderball' by Tom Jones & John Barry

Tom Jones is live and sweatin'! No wonder Eddy was such a mark for this guy. He kills this song. Legend is he passed out while hitting that last long note. Visuals are nice. Very lava lamp. The first of many, many, many Bond intros where the song is vastly superior to the visuals.

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You Only Live Twice (1967)
Dir. Lewis Gilbert
'You Only Live Twice' by Nancy Sinatra & John Barry

Kinda bland, honestly. Both the song and the visuals. Bothers me that the segue into the credits with the red bloom comes from the tiny blood splotch next to Bond's wrist and not the giant pool beside his ribs. The song is a bit overrated and the instrumentation doesn't really mesh well. Lyrics are decent, though. The later take Nancy Sinatra does, largely divorced of the Japanese inspired sound that John Barry forced in for the film version, is a general improvement but still feels kinda lopsided and unfocused. Billie Eilish would probably kill this tune, Lord forgive me for saying so. Very rare misstep for John Barry, in my opinion. But most people love this song so what do I know?

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On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)
Dir. Peter R. Hunt
'On Her Majesty's Secret Service' orchestral theme by John Barry

The debut of the falling man silhouette motif that'll be used in these intros for the rest of forever. The hourglass / martini glass conceit is really quite clever but the execution with the scenes from the previous movies is goofy and ill advised if you're trying to make people forget that Connery isn't in this one. This is actually one of the better pre-Brosnan Bond movies on the whole and poor George Lazenby puts on a decent performance but it's totally snuffed out by the entire vibe of this flick. George never had a chance because it's not the kinda story to introduce a new actor with; it's the kind to write an old one out on. "This never happened to the other fellow," indeed. John Barry's theme is great, as usual. One of the Bond intros I come back to rewatch the most often because of it. Even though the chick with the pointy b-cup rat boobs and the snarling Japanese dude with the sword make me laugh.

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Diamonds Are Forever (1971)
Dir. Guy Hamilton
'Diamonds Are Forever' by Shirley Bassey

The debut of the parting lady hands silhouette motif that'll be used in these intros for the rest of forever. That poor cat does not want to be there. You can see it grimace as the offscreen extra obviously pokes it in the butt to make it crawl under the leg for that one shot. Watching them obviously have to edit around the cat not wanting to do a damn thing during its scenes is amusing. Never work with animals, folks. At least not ones with expressive faces. Intro is serviceable but the Shirley Bassey tune kills. The best written of the Bond songs, easily. 

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Live and Let Die (1973)
Dir. Guy Hamilton
'Live and Let Die' by Wings

The (British) Empire not sending their best

The gunbarrel guy misses me by about two feet to the right but I still die anyway. Fucking wonky hitboxes. Intro sequence is really good but the song is overplayed. Very overplayed. To the point it actively detracts from my enjoyment. Can we just stop playing this song on the radio, please?

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The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
Dir. Guy Hamilton
'The Man with the Golden Gun' by Lulu

Intro sucks. Totally bland. Taking a buncha 7/10 women and turning them into 4/10s by making them butterfaced in water ripples sure was a decision. The song by Lulu is a bop but I, like most human beings, would have rather liked Alice Cooper's theme to be used instead.

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The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
Dir. Lewis Gilbert
'Nobody Does it Better' by Carly Simon

Not a bad song but not my favorite. Elegant but kinda fluffly on the whole. Intro sequence itself is one of the better Moore era ones. Definitely the best of the "naked broads in silhouette" genre. The posing is actually dynamic and fun with some memorable visuals. The balance beam act on the gun and Moore casually disarming a group of marching naked Russian female soldiers with a single push being high points. I'm still waiting for someone with SFM to remake this with the Spy from TF2 and Scout's mom. "The Spy as The Spy in 'The Spy Who Loved Me'". 

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Moonraker (1979)
Dir. Lewis Gilbert
'Moonraker' by Shirley Bassey

Totally phoned in. I know what they were going for - naked babes floating in space - but it fails in execution. Song's a bit of a snoozer, too. Not bad, just too sedate. I still don't know what the fuck a moonraker is or why he thinks his dreams will come true.

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For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Dir. John Glen
'For Your Eyes Only' by Sheena Easton

Odd decision to have this basically just be a Sheena Easton music video but after how awful Moonraker's intro was I can't blame them for trying something new. Unfortunately... this has the exact same problems as Moonraker! Boring-ass intro, sedate love song, last minute obligatory addition feel. The song isn't bad but it's not spectacular either. I dunno how much of my ambivalence towards Moore's Bond has to do with him being miscast in the role and how much has to do with the films feeling totally half-assed compared to everyone else.

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Octopussy (1983)
Dir. John Glen
'All Time High' by Rita Coolidge

It's just Moonraker again. For the third movie in a row. Fucking hell. Song is, once again, decent but unremarkable. Saxophone gives it a slight edge over the others. The saxophone is objectively the best instrument and elevates everything it's used in by at least half a letter grade. Intro is disappointing. They tease you making it look like they're gonna do the From Russia With Love thing but updated with swingin' '80s laser projection technology, but no. Halfway decent image of a buncha arms holding guns wrapping around a cardboard cutout of Bond to give him a hug. Sorta ruined by there being five of them. Guess he's getting frisky with General Greivous' sister. This is followed by Bond getting annihilated by a holdhout pistol that shoots lasers so I'm not just creating baseless celebrity gossip.
We almost had James Brolin replace Roger Moore in this movie. We were so close. Between that screentest and Roy Scheider's spy scenes in Marathon Man (1976) it's damn sad that the best Bond material from the Roger Moore era didn't actually come from a James Bond movie.

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A View to a Kill (1985)
Dir. John Glen
'A View to a Kill' by Duran Duran

Oh thank you God, a good intro. Not the biggest Duran Duran fan on the planet but they may as well be Roy Orbison following up the slog we just got through. We're pure '80s here with new wave and neon lasers. Dated? Yes. Do I care? No. Song rules. Intro is serviceable with it's glow-in-the-dark painted ladies and Bond's hilarious cardboard cutout actually doing things for once. Good movie, too. Easily my favorite of the Roger Moore era. That it has Christopher Walken attempting to plunge California into the ocean is a large part of that.

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The Living Daylights (1987)
Dir. John Glen
'The Living Daylights' by aha

Dalton era time. Timothy Dalton is my favorite Bond actor. He's a barely constrained, shallowly charismatic sociopath who enjoys his job a little too much and only feels at rest when he's slamming down booze, cigarettes, or poon; all of which unreasonably expensive and paid for by English tax dollars. In short, all he's missing is the scar and he'd just straight up be James Bond from the books. Song by aha (a-ha? A-ha? they change it all the damn time) absolutely rules. Very punchy intro. Visuals are still generic but the music carries it.

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License to Kill (1989)
Dir. John Glen
'License to Kill' by Gladys Knight

Fairly generic intro but killer, killer song. They combined the bombastic bass sound of the '80s with the smooth ballad sound they wanted to go for in the '70s and in the process inadvertently rediscovered the sound that made the original Shirley Bassey songs work. Easily one of my favorite Bond songs. Doesn't hurt that it was later used as the inspiration for Dean Malenko's underrated WWF theme. Which was then in turn used as the base for Antonio Cesaro's theme.

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GoldenEye (1995)
Dir. Martin Campbell
'Goldeneye' by Tina Turner

The best Bond intro by a lot. Sorry to go along with the pack but sometimes, rarely, the mob is right. Everything works. We're still doing the naked broads in silhouette thing for brand recognition but the camera tracking, pacing, staging, and transitions are all top notch and memorable. The Soviet hammer crumbling in such a way that it matches the angle and position of the pistol introduced from offscreen is aesthetically satisfying in a way that's impossible to describe to people who didn't eat breakfast this morning. And then they go and do it AGAIN by matching the bend of the woman with the sledgehammer to the high heeled shoe, all while seamlessly pulling off the very difficult task of switching the natural eye tracking from upwards to downwards and then to the left by utilizing two elements in the foreground to prime the viewer for it. You could teach an entire film directing class from this intro alone. The best part of an outstandingly good movie. Oh and the song slaps, too.

I'm a proponent of the theory that after a certain length of time has elapsed, be it ten years or fifty depending upon the narrative lifespan of the lynchpin character, all entries in a franchise become fanfiction regardless of their quality as they've moved so far away from the cultural context of their origin point they've divorced from it completely. Art does not exist in a vacuum and death of the author is and always has been a cope perpetuated by people who are either too fucking lazy to research the climate from which it came from or, far more often, have an agenda of their own to push and cannot process that people they disagree with created something they like. Love it though I do, I'd say the Brosnan era, in which the Soviet Union has totally collapsed IRL and all true first world nations' main adversaries became themselves, is where James Bond crossed that threshold and everything from GoldenEye onward is fanfiction of varying quality. James Bond without the Cold War backdrop is just a prissy misogynist fed with no real purpose. That is textually the whole conceit of the character dating back to the very first Bond book. Which is meant to be read as a tragedy, I should add.

Now that I've thoroughly pissed everyone off, let's continue along.

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Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
Dir. Roger Spottiswoode
'Tomorrow Never Dies' by Sheryl Crow

Great visual stuff with the circuit boards, LEDs, and see-through guns. Same great shot tracking as GoldenEye. Brosnan Bond doesn't have a single bad intro. Sheryl Crow's vocals take a little getting used to but I've come around on them. Great song but not my favorite. Could've gone without the obvious tease of showing that one titty, though. Crosses the line from alluring to cheesecake. Reminds me of some shit that the WWF would've done during the Attitude Era. This coming from the same guy who said the chicks in the Goldfinger intro should've been naked. Showing titty is fine in my book as long as it serves a purpose.

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The World Is Not Enough (1999)
Dir. Michael Apted
'The World is Not Enough' by Garbage

Top tier Bond theme. Garbage slays it. Good intro, too. They finally shake things up with the obligatory naked broads in the Brosnan era and start getting artsy with it; a much needed change. The use of iridescent color and crude oil makes this one memorable.

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Die Another Day (2002)
Dir. Lee Tamahori
'Die Another Day' by Madonna

Not as bad as everyone says. Nowhere near the top but I'll take this over Moonraker or For Your Eyes Only any day. Late stage Madonna is late stage Madonna; if you can get over that, the rest of the intro is pretty great. It was a controversial call to have the title sequence actually be a part of the narrative but I think it's an experiment that works, unlike the music video for the aforementioned For Your Eyes Only. The slaggy dancing women being elements of ice, fire, and electricity is great. The shots of them flying off as sparks and acting as spazmatic electrodes is unironically really creative.

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Casino Royale (2006)
Dir. Martin Campbell
'You Know My Name' by Chris Cornell

Blows my mind that only four years passed between Die Another Day and this. It feels like an entirely different civilization created it; which isn't too far off the mark, I suppose, as this is the first Bond flick produced purely in a post-9/11 world. Visuals are nice, song is decent. Cornell has never been my favorite vocalist but he's got his moments. I like this sequence but it looks like it was made in photoshop. 

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Quantum of Solace (2008)
Dir. Marc Forster
'Another Way to Die' by Alicia Keys & Jack White

Not as bad as I remember. Fundamentally a good intro - basically picked straight outta the Moore era but with some Brosnan quirks to improve the overall quality - but needs a little more contrast on the colors. Frenetic pace is okay but you really need color to pull it off. I like that this movie and Die Another Day both use the GoldenEye iris motif. The song is pretty good, actually, but not my favorite. They should've gone with Shirley Bassey's infinitely superior 'No Good About Goodbye' which, curiously, utilizes the motifs from the score despite several Bond YouTubers telling me for dead certain that it was never planned to be used in the movie (citation: trust me bro, I've got a Bond poster behind me).

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Skyfall (2012)
Dir. Sam Mendes
'Skyfall' by Adele

Spoils a little too much of the movie for my liking but damn, really great otherwise. The song rules. The tracking and editing are great. The best use of the falling man motif. Feels a bit too much like a Best Of compilation at times (like the movie in general, honestly) but all is forgiven with that incredible Rorschach sequence and making a damn near four minute credit scene fly by like nothing. Adele is a passable upper mid tier white woman soul singer type who cropped up when white people music was at the lowest point it's ever been in human history. Therefore she's lionized as an all-time great artist when in truth she just lucked out when the Amy Winehouse spot on the card became vacant. 

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Spectre (2015)
Dir. Sam Mendes
'Writing on the Wall' by Sam Smith

This intro is way too long. Should have ended with the gun firing ink. People actually sighed with annoyance during my screening when it kept going after that. Visually cool at points but coulda done without the octopus sex. Fucking Hollywood weirdos. The GoldenEye iris makes a return with icky tentacles. They really go all in with tentacles in this one. Sam Smith's falsetto is insufferable. The decent instrumentation and his low notes on "FOR YOU" save this from being my least favorite Bond intro. They actually cut out the penultimate chorus from the movie version because Sam Smith's falsetto breaks and it sounds like he's dying of an asthma attack.

A lot of people prefer the Radiohead song but I'm more ambivalent. I like a lot of Radiohead's stuff against my better judgment, but their Spectre theme just sounds like one of those videos of a cat meowing into a microphone. If we're including songs that should've been used instead, I prefer Judas Priest's track of the same name from "Firepower".

Yes, I know it was never intended to be used with this movie and it's a total coincidence they released a song with that title a few years after this flick, but I can dream.

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No Time To Die (2021)
Dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga
'No Time to Die' by Billie Eilish

This song rules. It's the song that people have gaslit themselves into thinking the Radiohead theme is. Billie Eilish is the perfect pick for this kinda downbeat Bond theme. Unfortunately this intro is the only good part of the movie and even then it's not terribly good. It tries to be both a shout out to the history of Bond opening credits and its own visually unique thing and kinda falls flat in the attempt. Remember what I said about all franchises ultimately devolving into fanfiction? The polka dots from Dr. No making a return and the spiral of pistols creating a DNA strand got a pop outta me, not gonna lie. The song works far better on its own.

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With the Bond franchise (and British culture in general) being functionally dead at the moment, that's all the Bond themes out there. Unless you count...

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Never Say Never Again (1983)
Dir. Irvin Kershner
'Never Say Never Again' by Michel Legrand

Yes, somehow they convinced Sean Connery to do one more Bond film in the '80s. Don't ask me how, I don't know. Connery just kinda did whatever the hell he felt like after a certain point in his life. Very much a Sir Christopher Lee type of sigma male. I guess being knighted grants you that sort of aura. The song is... eh, decent enough. The intro is not a Bond intro at all. Instead it's a typical action scene with the song playing over it. A fairly decent one but it doesn't count. Song is lower mid tier on its own. At least this is the only non-canon James Bond film anyone knows abo-

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Casino Royale (1967)

Dir. John Huston, Ken Hughes, Val Guest, Robert Parrish, Joe McGrath, and let's say Alan Smithee and Goldust's wife Marlena while we're at it

'Casino Royale theme' by Burt Bacharach & Herb Alpert

Cartoon animatics are fun and Orson Welle's big fat head gives Goldfinger a run for its money. I dunno why everyone is dressed up like angels but I've been told that the subtleties of British comedy often escape us Americans. It's a comedy so it's of course lighter than anything in the main series. I do wonder why the animated style was never tried for one of the mainline Bond films, though. It would have certainly broken up the monotony of barely naked broads. Burt's theme is fun but not memorable.

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...okay, any more I should know about?

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James Bond Jr. (1991)

Dir. Bill Hutton & Tony Love

'James Bond Jr. theme' by Dennis C. Brown & Maxine Sellers

An animated series about James Bond's nephew... James Bond. Apparently they're doing a Rey Mistero / Rey Mistero Jr. type deal. Yes, this was a thing. It lasted one season, as most cartoon shovelware did during the time. It looks... better than Max Steel but not as good as Jonny Quest. I wouldn't know, I've never watched it. The theme song makes me groan. It's one of those that just shows clips from the show instead of having a proper intro. A solid 95% of cartoons that do that are the drizzling shits. If they didn't put forth the effort to animate an intro it's a good indication that the show is being made as a tax write-off. It sucks and I hate it. Take it away.

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Even if that's not all of 'em that's all I'm gonna do. I can't take anymore.

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TOP FIVE INTROS:
1) GoldenEye (1995)
2) Goldfinger (1964)
3) Skyfall (2012)
4) From Russia With Love (1963)
5) On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)


BOTTOM FIVE INTROS:
1) Moonraker (1979)
2) For Your Eyes Only (1981)
3) Spectre (2015)
4) Octopussy (1983)
5) You Only Live Twice (1967)


TOP FIVE SONGS:
1) 'The World is Not Enough' by Garbage
2) 'License to Kill' by Gladys Knight
3) 'No Time to Die' by Billie Eilish
4)  'Diamonds Are Forever' by Shirley Bassey
5) 'GoldenEye' by Tina Turner


BOTTOM FIVE SONGS:
1) 'For Your Eyes Only' by Sheena Easton
2) 'Writing on the Wall' by Sam Smith
3) 'All Time High' by Rita Coolidge
4) 'You Only Live Twice' by Nancy Sinatra
5) 'Moonraker' by Shirley Bassey

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Darkman II: Featuring Durant From The Darkman Franchise

 
Darkman II: The Return of Durant (1995)
Dir. Bradford May
Universal Home Video
Rating: C+

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...and Darkman too, I guess

The return of... who?

Oh right, the guy with the weird haircut from the first one. I think he chopped off fingers with a cigar cutter or something. He got exploded in a head-on collision between a low flying helicopter and a cement bridge. Somehow the writers decided he kicked out of this instead of simply creating a new villain for the second movie.

The proper title of this flick is “Darkman II: The Return of the Only Person We Could Get From the First One”. 'Cause this is 1995 and Liam Neeson is not returning your calls after (almost) winning an Academy Award for Schindler's List (1994). He's a serious actor now. No more sci-fi or comic book movies for him, no sir. Frances McDormand, similarly, was in the midst of actually winning an Academy Award for Fargo (1996), setting off a chain of events that'd result in her getting perennially nominated for starring in all the Coen Brothers movies that nobody actually watched. 

Speaking of directors who haven't had a finger on the pulse since 2007, Sam Raimi is nowhere to be seen either. He's neither directing nor does he have any credits on the screenplay other than the obligatory “Executive producer” (translation: $50 tier Patreon donor) and “Based on characters created by,”(translation: We paid him $100 to make this movie). That's a shame as his unique visual style was easily the main draw of the first one.

Replacing Liam Neeson in the role of main character Peyton Westlake / Darkman is none other than Imhotep himself, Arnold Vosloo. The obvious drop off in perceived skill aside, I've no problem with this. If ever there were a franchise that had a hardcoded excuse to recast the main character between each installment, this is it.

- - -


The movie opens promisingly with a flashback to the first movie in which Liam Neeson gets his head dunked into a vat of exploding science goop by the minions of Robert G. Durant (Larry Drake).

We then pull out to reveal that this scene is a reshoot and said exploding science goop has completely transformed Liam Neeson into Arnold Vosloo, miraculously changing his hair color and length between frames and switching his accent from an Irishman attempting to sound American into a South African attempting to sound English. This retcon is completely unnecessary as Darkman's whole gimmick of wearing lifelike masks means he can feasibly be portrayed by just about any actor with only a throwaway line for explanation. All you had to do was start the story in media res and everyone would've gotten it.

That said, I'd be lying if I said Arnold Vosloo redubbing the scene of an exploding, flaming Liam Neeson flying by the camera didn't make the whole thing worth it.

It should be noted that Strack is completely cut out of both this recap and the movie on large, canonizing just how inconsequential a villain he was.



    Flash forwards however many months to the present. Underworld crime boss Robert G. Durant kicks out of a coma he's been in for nearly three years. Everyone is just as surprised as I am that he could survive a head on helicopter crash that exploded him to death with only a couple facial scars to mark it. Such is life. In the meantime a power vacuum has arisen in [nondescript liberal run city] during Durant's absence. One that seems to make Darkman happy as increased drug dealer and gun runner violence means increased opportunity for him to steal from criminals to fund his research. Darkman is not so much a superhero as he is a self-interested third party that sometimes stops crimes when he feels like it.

Speaking of Darkman, he spends his days in full costume collecting useful scrap as one of the hundreds of itinerants in the poor side of town and his nights using it to build a full supervillain lair underneath the city inside the abandoned railway tunnels. Peyton, despite his protestation to the contrary at the end of the previous movie, is singularly devoted to perfecting his artificial skin formula and creating a mix that'll last beyond ninety-nine minutes in the sunlight so he can have a permanent replacement for his lost face. This retcon I don't mind as it gives him something to strive for and fits into my interpretation that Peyton was completely talking out of his ass at the end of the last movie due to being so juiced on adrenaline and guilt over getting his girlfriend endangered that he was willing to say anything to push her away.

Despite having a vested interest in remaining anonymous, Darkman for some reason insists upon doing almost all face-to-face dealings in this movie wearing a replica of his Peyton Westlake face, making him easily recognizable to anyone paying any modicum of attention. He's not stupid so I'm gonna read this as a character flaw of his. A manifestation of his need for validation of his self-worth. He wants to be Peyton Westlake again and wants to have real human connections. Vanity? A decent amount.

Durant's EVIIIIIIL plan is to legally purchase a condemned warehouse and use it to manufacture high quality domestic firearms to undercut the international gun smuggling cartels, thereby extricating them from the city and providing manufacturing jobs for the working class American criminal. The fiend! It just so happens that his property of choice is the current location for the lab of a Dr. David Brinkman (Jesse Collins) who, of course, is working on a light resistant polymer that Peyton figures would sync up nicely with his own research. Just as they're hitting things off, Durant's goons come a'calling for Dr. Brinkman.

You've seen the first movie so you can guess what happens next.


    It's eventually revealed that Durant's plan goes beyond sensible gangster economics and into the land of Bronze Age comic book insanity. He jailbreaks and recruits the insane Dr. Alfred Hathaway (Lawrence Dane) and intends to use his knowledge to build ATOMIC POWERED RAYGUNS in lieu of the Russian tax write-offs the rest of the gangs are using. He's going to do a limited run of them and sell them to a local skinhead group to the tune of $5,000,000 a pop. Batteries not included. That's... so stupid I kinda love it. Setting aside the obvious logistical problem of consolidating power after you've handed off the weapons. What's to stop the skinheads from turning you into a smoking pile and stealing your scientist and Russian connection, Ivan Dragunov (Rod Wilson), who know how to manufacture the weapon and have access to the power supply respectively? Just a tiny logical oversight from an otherwise brilliantly petty blue collar villain plan.

    Meanwhile, Peyton butts heads with Laurie (Renee O'Connor), Dr. Brinkman's sister, when she agrees to sell the property to Durant's front firm for $1,000,000 in cash after Durant organizes his murder to strongarm a sale. Even after Peyton tells her that Durant is the man who murdered her brother, she's still willing to go ahead with it until he provides irrefutable proof. A million dollars is a lot of money and she's currently living in the tumbledown side of town, barely scraping a living together in a strip club.

In order to win Laurie over to his side, Peyton begins feeding information about Durant's organization to news reporter Jill Randall (Kim Delaney) of trashy shock news program Street Copy. Jill is a total delight. In addition to being the best overall performance given in the movie (despite how briefly she's in it), the character smokes three packs a day, hates her shlocky job, and is ultimately proven to be very good at it when she deduces Darkman's identity through simple logic. When Jill confronts him about it, Peyton explodes into a paroxysm of rage and admits out loud both to her and to himself that he's going after Durant purely out of personal spite towards him for ruining his life, that avenging Brinkman is just the icing on the cake; that him even attempting to follow legal channels in the loosest sense by letting her on the case is just a means to fuck Durant over by preventing his firm from buying the Brinkman's property; whether or not anyone believes that Durant is alive, whether or not there is any evidence to convict or even arrest him should it be proven that he is, whether or not any of this amounts to more than a conciliatory gesture towards the notion of civility and due process; he is going to murder the ever-loving dogshit outta Robert G. Durant for his own personal pleasure and there isn't a damn thing anyone can do to stop him. 

Well, he's got my vote.

Jill goes through with the story, figuring she can wrangle Durant the old fashioned way by causing enough of a media stink. Peyton warily congratulates her. She then steps inside her car, turns the key and instantly explodes in a fireball. Whomp whomp. Well, if this movie has taught me anything it's that she'll probably be back for the next one.

Ultimately this does end up having the desired effect as Laurie Brinkman puts two-and-two together to realize that Robert G. Durant did indeed have her brother murdered and reneges on the decision to sell their property to him. She makes it out alive due to Darkman impersonating of one of Durant's thugs, Eddie (David Ferry), and helping her escape, trapping another one of Durant's goons in a glass revolving door in a callback to the first movie. This case of extreme deja vu tilts the hand to Durant that Peyton Westlake is once again mucking up his plans and he rather humorously draws a gun and begins chasing Peyton down the street on foot in the middle of rush hour traffic with all the gusto an out-of-shape forty year-old coma patient can muster as he cannot believe the cosmic level of bullshit required for this exact same set of circumstances to be happening to him again. I totally get it, man.

    The finale of the movie is rather genre standard. Durant and his goons kidnap Laurie to lure Darkman into a trap, which he of course falls for like an idiot. Cue the obligatory Batman warehouse gunfight cum ninja goon elimination scene. That sentence looks really lewd now that I've written it down but it's too funny for me to want to edit it. Eventually Durant attempts to escape in his specially modified bulletproof longcar only to realize too late that Darkman has stuffed a pipebomb into the glove compartment. Durant gets exploded, not unlike how poor Jill did earlier. Vengeance sated, Darkman takes his leave of Laurie and returns to his life of... whatever the hell he was doing before this movie started. Collecting tin cans, I think.

In a postscript, Jill is memorialized on the TV for being a reporter of alleged integrity and Peyton tips his hat to her, musing that all his pursuit of vengeance has done is mar the world further and place him back exactly where he was at the start.

- - -


Danny Elfman's themes are reused with additional music provided by Randy Miller. It's good. Unremarkable, but good. The VFX and makeup are similarly decent for the most part but the Darkman burned face mask is notably less articulate than the one in the previous film. Barring some really obvious ADR work and one horrifying nested mouth shot in the finale of Arnold Vosloo's teeth glimmering behind the oversized ones of the mask, it was close enough not to be immersion breaking. Little imperfections that a more seasoned director would've buffed out.

- - -

The first film was inspired by Universal Monsters with a twist of Batman and The Shadow thrown in for flavor. This one is clearly inspired by Frank Miller's Daredevil run, as pretty much every street level superhero story produced between the years 1984 and 2007 was to some extent. The character of Jill Randall is functionally a genderswapped Ben Urich. The exposé piece she plans to release on Durant is even titled “The Fall of a Kingpin” if the references up until that point were too subtle. I happen to be a big fan of pre-”Sin City” Frank Miller's work so this was a plus for me. I even like RoboCop 3 (1993) quite a bit for all its faults. I just vibe with the man's work the way Portland hipsters vibe with Wes Anderson.


- - -

FAVORITE QUOTES:

[flashback to the first film of Peyton's flaming silhouette flying by the camera as it gets exploded]
PEYTON: [redubbed by Arnold Vosloo]
AAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUH!


THUG: [rattles Darkman with an AK-47; Darkman blocks it with a manhole cover]
What the hell are you?!
DARKMAN: A concerned citizen. [frisbee chucks the cover into his face, knocking him flat; proceeds to root through the thug's drug deal briefcase, tossing the bags of coke out next to his mewling form before absconding with all the money just as the police arrive] Thanks for the donation.


DURANT: [watching scummy news show Street Copy recount the drug deal Darkman foiled]
Tragic. Simply tragic. I abhor violence. Especially when it doesn't make me money.


DURANT: [whilst his thugs torture Brinkman to death]
Quietly, gentlemen. This is a school night.


[Dragunov reveals he has a cache of Russian plutonium batteries]
HATHAWAY: Are they stable?
DRAGUNOV: These cells were manufactured by technicians in workers' paradise of eastern Uzbekistan. Only finest Yugoslavian materials were used in their engineering. They are reliable as your Ford Pinto.


DARKMAN: Eddie? You killed my friend.
EDDIE: [nervous chuckle] I'm sorry. Forgive me?
DARKMAN: Apology accepted.
[Darkman backhands him off a raised platform; Eddie falls and splatters the back of his skull open on the cement floor below]


[Durant trains the atomic rifle on Darkman]
DURANT: I can't tell you what an epic pain-in-the-ass you've been. But nothing lasts forever, pizza face.


[closing narration]
DARKMAN: Vengeance has many casualties, the guilty and the innocent. My salvation was buried with those who would rescue me from revenge. And so, I continue to face the darkness... alone.

- - - 

It's Pronounced "Dark-mihn"

 

Darkman (1990)
Dir. Sam Raimi
Universal Pictures
Rating: B-

Several, actually. But we'll get to that.

    Sam Raimi, despite apparently contracting the same parasitic brainworms that infect fellow once-talented director Tim Burton, is reasonably good at his job when he actually cares about what he's producing. Most of the time. He's basically the Great Illustrated Classics version of Peter Jackson, who happens to be the Publix version of Guillermo del Toro, who is in turn the Temu version of Ridley Scott, who is a distant descendant of the divinely inspired F.W. Murnau. Tolkien writes extensively about this concept in The Silmarillion.

I grew up on Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films. The first two, anyway. I saw them both in theaters multiple times and watched the DVDs so often I've nearly got the screenplays memorized (see also: Batman '89). I did not see Spider-Man 3 (2007) in theaters and put off watching it for many years because I heard that it sucked. As alien as it may sound to some, hate-watching did not become a mainstream phenomenon until around the time YouTube started allowing videos longer than ten minutes in length. If word on the street was that a movie wasn't worth plunking down the seven bucks to see in one of the three theater chains within a twenty minute drive of your house, you could take that assessment at face value and wait a few months to rent it at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video for four bucks. We did not know how good we had it in the Bush era. Eventually I snagged a DVD copy of Spider-Man 3 during Hollywood Video's going-out-of-business fire sale and yes, it was just as disappointing as I was lead to believe.

But lo, I also picked up a different DVD around the same time. A lovely three disc set out of a Walmart bin called the DARKMAN TRILOGY. It featured this flick and the following two Darkman films which got straight-to-VHS releases and starred Imhotep from the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies in the lead role. Yes, I am planning on eventually watching those as well. Especially since I cannot remember a damn thing about them.

"The Mummy movies or the Darkman sequels?" you ask.

"Yes," I respond.

- - - 

To repeat the same cliffnotes version of the movie's production that every hack video essayist has cobbled together, Darkman came about when Sam Raimi couldn't get the film rights to either Batman or The Shadow and decided to create his own OC instead 'cause he's an OG like that. 

The point where I differentiate from other hack essayists is that I unironically love this character more than either Batman or The Shadow. Batman is a dead franchise; totally played out in every logical and illogical extreme to the point it has no stories left to tell and the character is a perfunctory part of the bleached, threadbare American psyche being kept on life support for merchandising rights. Similarly, The Shadow is a really cool idea that is sadly never coming back into prominence again no matter how much psychic energy RazörFist expends in attempting to manifest it as a tulpa of bygone better days. Whenever he's not hypocritically stealing from it for his own stories, that is.

I'm just teasing, Razör. I love you. We bald men need to stick together.

- - - 

    Our movie in question stars part-time actor and full-time douchebag Liam Neeson trying and failing to pull off an American accent as Dr. Peyton Westlake, who in typical superhero fashion is an overworked scientist of unclear doctorate working upon a cool invention that he's gonna find multiple alternative vigilante justice based uses for. In this case it's a synthetic skin he's attempting to master the formula for so it can be mass produced and replace skin grafting for burn victims. Trouble is he just can't get the damn stuff to hold form after an hour and thirty minutes. Fortunately for him that's just enough time to watch this movie without anyone suspecting a thing.

Peyton, despite being an emotionally stunted Reed Richards type, has somehow managed to land a supportive girlfriend his own age named Julie Hastings (played by the very pretty Frances McDormand) who works in a law firm. Julie inadvertently gets mixed up in a RoboCop-esque landgrab scheme by her obviously evil corpoboss Strack (Colin Friels) and his paid off gangster gang ran by finger collecting miniboss psychopath Robert G. Durant (Larry Drake; not to be confused with the more famous Larry from Den of the Drake).

Strack's EVIIIIIIIL plan is to demolish the crumbling side of the city and rebuild it, thereby creating thousands of new jobs and cleaning up a polluted riverside while also stimulating the local economy and running off the ghetto crime lords inhabiting the slums. The fiend! Because he utilizes Robert G. Durant's gang to dust the local bangers and pays bribes to the city zoning committee this makes him a villain in the fiction. In the real world this makes him an efficient civil contractor and a potential gubernatorial candidate should he later choose to enter politics.

Just once I want a competency porn movie where these guys are the protagonists and the myopic hippie fuckasses who don't understand how the game of politics is played are the meddling morons paid off by the real villains. It'd basically be Thank You For Smoking (2005) but played straight.

Strack is not memorable in the least and his grand evil scheme is entirely inconsequential to the plot. You could have cut him out entirely and the story would've been better for it. Robert G. Durant, following in the fine tradition of minibosses, is far more interesting and has some real rizz to him, as the TikTok Americans say. In fact, the main villain plot and the vast gulf between supervillain and miniboss memorability harkens back to the aforementioned RoboCop to the point I wouldn't be surprised if Raimi had it on in the background while hashing out the script.

    Peyton has the absolute worst timing in the world as he has a major scientific breakthrough regarding his synthetic skin - that it is photosensitive and will hold form in the dark - right before Durant shows up and has his goons beat him near to death in an extremely memorable extended torture sequence that includes fire stunts, claymation hands getting electrocuted, and ends in the supremely hilarious sight of a burning Peyton getting shot straight into the air out of his exploding laboratory toward the camera while screaming like a Roman candle.

POV: Satan witnessing John McCain arrive in Hell on 25th August, 2018

Fortunately Peyton kicks out of this thanks to an experimental procedure (the Rangeberitz Technique) performed on him by Nurse Alex Price (whom is laying low in America after her last patient turned into a werewolf and mauled all those people in Piccadilly Circus). Said procedure deadens all his nerve endings (and apparently somehow prevents infections from taking root in his multiple open wounds). As a result of this Peyton cannot feel pain. In fact, Peyton cannot feel any tactile sensation at all. He basically gets turned into a babyface version of Superman: TAS's excellent take on Metallo. And much like Metallo, the complete loss of the most basic of all the senses drives Peyton completely mental as he begins lashing out physically and verbally to compensate for a locked-in brain starving for stimulation. Understandable. 

Nurse Alex Price will finally have her karmic balance come due later that year when Charles Lee Ray rather lamely cuts her throat off-screen.

Peyton stumbles back into the ruins of his laboratory, salvages what little he can from it, then hides out in an abandoned factory (which looks really familiar - I think it might be the same one from either the finale of A Nightmare on Elm St. 2 (1985) or Dirty Harry (1971)) and begins rebuilding.

I'm also 90% sure that's the same cat actor from Pet Sematary.

    The remainder of the movie is rather good scenes of angst acting from Liam Neeson intercut with him trying to rekindle his relationship with Julie and systematically murdering the shit outta Robert G. Durant's gang using misdirection tactics and pure force. I'm a sucker for a good supernatural revenge story. See also: The Crow (both the 1994 movie and the original James O'Barr series) and the very underrated grimdark furry comic "Cliff" by the team of David Hopkins and Roz Gibson. 

After a few months in hiding, Peyton finally gets a working mask of his old face and proceeds to meet up again with Julia in the most romantic and reassuring way possible: stalking her to the cemetery and standing stiffly in the distance, silently glaring right at her in broad daylight while she's standing over his gravestone in a shot that looks straight out of The Innocents (1961) or The Haunting (1963). She understandably nearly has a heart attack. This is a man of charm and tact.

I say this as if that isn't exactly how I'd do it, too.

Peyton's attempts to woo Julie are hampered by his extreme self-confidence issues stemming from being horrifically deformed and his attempts to hide it from her. This isn't a deal breaker for Julie once she finds out, ironically enough. I guess she always suspected him getting exploded into a fireball would leave some lasting marks. 

Following a very out of place, much too long, and not too terribly well done helicopter chase stunt scene that almost certainly ate up most of the budget and ends with Durant getting violently blown up (he gets better), Peyton follows Strack to the top of his construction site in order to rescue a kidnapped Julie and they have a standard superhero movie finale that ends with Peyton dropping Strack off the rigging to his death. Julie tries to comfort Peyton and convince him they can still salvage this and have their old life back... but Peyton is having none of it. Juiced up on adrenaline and mentally wrecked from the whole sequence of events, he admits to her that he doesn't feel right anymore. He doesn't feel human anymore. He flees from her, using his synthetic disguises to blend into morning foot traffic. As he does so he declares that Peyton Westlake is dead. From now on you can call him... Darkman. Chef's kiss.

- - - 

Now... why do I like Darkman so much as a character? Largely because he scratches my angst itch. He's an outsider. A loner. A man desperate for connection. He's also his own worst enemy. He's trapped within himself, unable to feel pain or pleasure and believing he's no longer deserving of either. He could use his synthetic skin to look like anyone. Hell, he's legally dead - he could go anywhere and start again. There's nothing stopping him from letting the world know he's alive and picking right back up where he left off. But he's been so decimated emotionally that he may as well not even be a man at all. Basically, I dig him because all those things people superimpose upon Batman and The Shadow in a flailing attempt to make them seem deeper than they are? That's what Darkman textually is. He is a man who is not really a man. Not anymore. Fully formed right outta the box. No decades of fanwankery or haphazardly incorporated retcons required. 

Cannot wait to see how they fuck that up in the sequels.

- - - 

Danny Elfman's score is a mixed bag. While the main theme is pretty underwhelming and comes off as a less cool version of what Jerry Goldsmith would do for The Shadow (1994) some of the ambient tracks like the music inside Darkman's warped DIY laboratory are appropriately great and really get across how this dude is a mentally unstable Universal Horror character in spirit.

The VFX are also a coin toss. While the costuming and the stylized in-camera stuff that's supposed to look like a comic book are great and the handful of digital images utilized are surprisingly good for the time, the blue and green screen stuff is really, really quite bad on the whole. Everyone knows bad CGI is bad. Bad blue screen is even worse because you'll have people with nostalgia goggles on tell you that it's charming and not engagement destroying trash.

Raimi's ever interesting framing and editing is what makes this movie as good as it is. The plot and acting is so-so, the music is Danny Elfman's cutting room scraps from Batman '89, and the action sequences actively detract from my enjoyment. All you need to make a movie like this work is to have a cool character concept and shoot it in a fun way. Either things will come together or they won't. Raimi's experience as a horror director really shines through in this. His innate understanding of how goofy and unnerving are two sides of the same coin has always been the main appeal of his work.

Seeing as how this is a crime movie filmed like a horror movie and follows a good man in a bad situation, this meets RazörFist's criteria for being a film noir. Unlike The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942). But I'm sure he'll throw in some other arbitrary qualifier if he ever reads this.

- - - 

FAVORITE QUOTES

PEYTON: [his flaming silhouette flying by the camera as it gets exploded] GAAAAARAAAAAAAAH-!!

[Peyton inadvertently sets one of his bandaged hands on fire with a Bunsen burner. He stares at it curiously before putting it out with a wet towel.]

PEYTON: My... my hands. They took my hands. [Begins sobbing; in the exact same voice as the famous "I could have done more" speech from the end of Schindler's List] THEY TOOK MY HANDS!

[Peyton utterly snaps; puts a funnel on his head and begins dancing around]

PEYTON: See the dancing freak! Pay five bucks! To see the dancing freak! Only five bucks!

JULIE: [to Strack] If you're not going to kill me... I have things to do. 

[Peyton holds Strack by the ankle over the edge of a building.]
STRACK: You let me die and you'll become as bad as me! Worse! You can't! I know you too well! Dropping me is not really an option for ya. That's not something you could live with.

[Peyton drops him like a sack of moldy oranges; Strack screams]

PEYTON: [deadpan] I'm learning to live with a lot of things.
[Distant CRASH of Strack's body hitting the road]

JULIE: [looking upon Peyton's deformed face fully for the first time] You'll perfect the skin. You'll make it work. It doesn't matter.
PEYTON: Julie... don't you think I told myself that, night after sleepless night? It's just a burn. Skin-deep. It doesn't matter. And if I covered it, hid behind a mask, you could love me for who I was inside. Without pity. But a funny thing happened. As I worked in the mask, I found the man inside was changing. He became... wrong. A monster. I can live with it now, but I don't think anyone else can.
JULIE: I want our life back.
[Peyton turns to leave; Julie calls after him]

JULIE: Peyton! Peyton!
DARKMAN: Peyton is gone.

[closing narration]
DARKMAN: I'm everyone. And no one. Everywhere. Nowhere. Call me... Darkman.

- - - 

A Tale of Two Tones

Batman Forever (1995)
Dir. Joel Schumacher
Warner Bros. Pictures
Rating: B- (B+ including deleted scenes)

"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.

- - -

    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.

"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.

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.

"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

- - - 

    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.

- - -

FAVORITE QUOTES

TWO-FACE: Fortune smiles. Another day of wine and roses – or in your case, beer and pizza!

CHASE: Let's just say I could write a hell of a paper on a grown man who dresses like a flying rodent.
BATMAN: [mildly offended] Bats aren't rodents, Dr. Meridian.

NYGMA: [after dropping Fred out the window into the comically oversized and improbably placed civic waterfall on the side of the Wayne Enterprises building] Ooh! Nice form but a little rough on the landing. He may have to settle for the bronze.

 
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]

TWO-FACE: [exasperated] WHY CAN'T YOU JUST DIE?! [shoots at him with a grenade launcher; repeatedly]

[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!