Val Kilmer Thinks He's Hot Stuff, But Christian Bale Has Two Top Guns And They're Attached To His Torso

Riddle me this: where do I even begin to insult Batman Forever? It fails on just about every level possible. Let's start off with a few positives: Robin is actually done fairly well and Chris O'Donnell did a pretty good job playing him. Michael Gough does a good job as Alfred, which is why he is the only actor that stars in all four of the original movies. Nicole Kidman is in it, and she's pretty attractive. The end. That's it. Now let's rip it apart! This is part two of my unofficially titled trilogy: "Why the First Four Batman Movies Suck."

Okay, let's deal with the giant mammarian chiroptera-shaped elephant in the room: bat-nipples. Even director Joel Schumacher has lowered his head in shame over the thought of these atrocities (and if he hasn't, he should). And they're slapped on verifiable Halloween costumes with enough fake abs to make even me appear to be capable of fighting crime. They're the physical representation of why the movie is bad: instead of Tim Burton's mistake, which was to capture the overall tone of the comics while tossing a lot of important things out the window, this movie (along with Batman & Robin) simply brings back the impossibly incorrect tone of the Adam West days and gives it a budget. The fight scenes are highly stylized and very silly, the film is rife with awful one-liners, and the city itself looks like an arcade game background on crack.

But I can forgive all of that, really. Because there are still the characters to deal with. Too bad they were butchered too. To begin with: The Riddler. I can't say as I'm a big Jim Carrey fan anyway (or a fan at all really) but at least when he's usually being annoying he's not annihilating one of my favorite villains in the process. Though some may perceive the character as a somewhat offbeat villain, and certainly silly given that the only exposure people have had to him was this performance, I always loved the character. If I turned evil, I would be The Riddler. Basically, he's a super genius who likes to flaunt his superiority so much that he leaves clues behind, both to enhance his narcissism by showing how smart he is and to see if anyone is worthy of deciphering his clues. He's not goofy. He's not imposing either. Basically he's a spindly geek who could never beat anyone in a fight, and usually doesn't even try because he lets his brain do the fighting for him (actually that sounds exactly like me, I should complete the transformation by wearing an all-green suit around). When Batman goes up against him, it's a battle of wits. He truly puts Batman's deductive reasoning and profiling skills to the test. And that incredible character, who is done so perfectly on the animated series, was turned into something even sillier than the Joker. He's a nutjob outfitted with neon lights who leaves clues that an eight-year-old could solve and yells "joygasm!" at one point. The sentence I'm currently writing was written twelve minutes after the previous one because I just fainted and hit my head. The character was reduced to a stereotypical "let's blow stuff up for the sole reason that I'm evil" mustache-twirling villain who just happens to wear a question mark.

Though I'm not like him in any way (at least hopefully not) Two-Face is another of my favorite villains, possibly my favorite Batman villain actually. Thank God they FINALLY did him justice in The Dark Knight with Aaron Eckhart's phenomenal, and largely under-appreciated, performance. The scene where he delivers what's probably my favorite line in the movie exemplifies everything they did correctly, and everything Forever got wrong: "In a cruel world, the only morality is chance." That line fully captures Two-Face's entire character flaw. Think about how distorted your mind would have to be to see no difference between killing someone and letting them live. He's a broken man, and he literally can't decide between holding onto the hero that he was, or the villain that he's become. So he flips a coin. That's powerful stuff, but Forever treats it like a gimmick. As much as I ordinarily love Tommy Lee Jones, and it was probably mostly the script's fault, his delivery is completely wrong. He flips the coin in a fashion that screams, "the script says I'm supposed to do this." In fact, at one point he keeps flipping until he gets the result he wants. That makes absolutely no sense, and it diminishes what has become one of the most well-known and interesting comic book villains of all time. And why pair him with The Riddler? This showcases the filmmaker's complete lack of understanding for the characters. The Riddler, narcissist that he is, would never work with anyone, let alone someone whose ability to make simple choices is determined by a coin. That's the complete opposite of The Riddler. They really made me feel as though they put all the villains who hadn't been done into a hat and pulled their names out. And much like the other costumes in the film, Two-Face's is way over-the-top. And whereas Christopher Nolan's description of how Two-Face should look for The Dark Knight was, "he should make people want to throw up if they saw him on the street" Joel Schumacher's was seemingly, "he should look like he just came from a kid's birthday party where they had face painting and he had to leave when the job was only half done because The Riddler needed him to wreak havoc on Gotham City."

All of that aside, the important question is, how was Batman? Well, truth be told, Val Kilmer's Batman is actually not too bad. His voice is appropriately gruff, and there are even one or two scenes related to Bruce's childhood that were probably remnants of a former, superior script. If they didn't give him lines and a plot that were so terrible, he actually would've been a pretty good Batman. But once again, the problem with Val (who I think is ordinarily a great actor, especially as Doc Holliday in Tombstone) is the same as Keaton in that Bruce Wayne is totally wrong. Whereas Keaton's Wayne was a misanthropic loner, Kilmer's takes it a step further. His Bruce Wayne voice is almost the same as his Batman voice. And at one point in the film he looks at an ink blot on the wall and says quite clearly in his Batman voice, "That looks like a bat." This is a step farther from the neon sign above Keaton's head, the one above Kilmer's head states:

NOT ONLY AM I OBVIOUSLY BATMAN, IF YOU CAN'T TELL THEN YOU'RE A MORON!

At least Keaton made an effort to hide his identity. Kilmer walks around in his expensive suit for the whole movie saying things such as:

"Man it's dark out tonight, just like my soul."

"My arm really hurts today, probably because I punched twelve drug dealers in the face last night."

"The death of my parents signified the death of Bruce Wayne, I became an expert at every fighting style and returned to Gotham City to don a cape as my alter ego, oh whoops, thought I was alone..."

As always, some slight hyperbole was involved with those quotes. BUT, he might as well be that obvious because if Jim Carrey can figure out you're Batman, so can the rest of the world. And whereas the action in the first two films was fairly well done, if not a bit cheesy simply because of the time period it was made during, the action in this film is incredibly campy. A big part of the Batman performance is how he handles himself during a fight. Christian Bale knocks people around tactically and quickly, crunching a lot of bones in the process. Kilmer (and once again, not entirely his fault) fights like he's in a stage play. Perhaps as though it's all happening live and he has to make sure not to actually hurt his fellow actors. They might as well have thrown in a few "biff" and "pows" because then it could've been an homage at least, instead of just plain stupid.

What's especially strange about this film is that there are a fair few good actors in it, the director has done some good work over the years, and the screenwriter also wrote Constantine, Cinderella Man, and has recently joined the writing staff of Fringe. So you'd think he would have come up with something good. Sadly, Batman Forever instead lives on as a movie with infinite potential that leaves the audience feeling like they've been doped by some of the Scarecrow's fear toxin. What's especially sad is that they made yet another Batman movie...and it's the worst of them all. Something so terrifyingly bad that it's taken years off of my life from stress. And I'll be discussing it in a future blog entry, same bat-URL, different bat-title.