Batman Forever

If anyone is wondering why Batman Forever wound up being the way it did, they need only look to the public response to Batman Returns. Parents decried the previous film's mature subject matter and dark tone. As a result, Warner Brothers called for the next entry in the series to be decidedly lighter in tone. Once Tim Burton stepped down as director, they hired Joel Schumacher to take over, resulting in a candy colored, neon infused spectacle. 

For the third outing, Batman (played by Val Kilmer) finds himself contending with the psychotic Two-Face (played by Tommy Lee Jones), who is a former district attorney named Harvey Dent who went psychotic when he was injured in a tragic accident, leaving half his face horribly scarred. One tragic night, Two-Face and his cronies crash the local circus, threatening to blow up the stadium if Batman does not show. The show's family of trapeze artists, The Flying Graysons, try to intervene and get rid of the bomb, which is suspended in the middle of the stadium. They are tragically killed when Two-Face shoots out the rigging from underneath them and they all tragically fall to their death except the youngest son, Dick Grayson (played by Chris O'Donnell). Bruce Wayne agrees to take the young man in after the tragedy. Meanwhile, at Wayne Enterprises, the brilliant but unstable Edward Nygma (played by Jim Carrey) is working on a new invention that manipulates brainwaves. However, he finds a curious side effect of using the device increases his own intellect in the process. After being turned down for a research grant by Bruce Wayne, Nygma decides to strike out on his own and takes on the visage of The Riddler. He then teams up with Two Face to help raise capital to put his plan into action to put one of his devices in every home in Gotham to milk everyone's brain waves and in the process hopefully discover the identity of Batman. Also hanging around is psychiatrist Dr. Chase Meridian (played by Nicole Kidman), who finds herself quite attracted to Batman. 

While Batman Forever more or less follows from the two Tim Burton directed films (who remained on board as a producer), this is a very different film from pretty much the get go. There is a lot more humor this time around and the campy sensibility that ultimately derailed the next film starts to make it's appearence here. Of course, with Jim Carrey as one of the two villains, this was to be expected. If Warner Brothers wanted to lighten things up, they got what they wanted in spades. We've got two villains, played by Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones, who have both dialed their performances up to eleven and are constantly trying to out crazy one another. It never becomes obnoxious or annoying, at least to me, but they are way over the top. Two Face in particular is far removed from his comic book counterpart and closer to Joker 2.0. On the other side of the coin, we have Val Kilmer in the dual role of Bruce Wayne and Batman. He doesn't do quite as well as Michael Keaton did in the role, but he's decent and manages to give a nice, grounded performance in a rather cartoonish film. Chris O'Donnell makes his first of two appearances as Dick Grayson who over the course of the film becomes Batman's sidekick Robin. He's decent in the film, even if the character can be a bit bratty at times and his determination to take out Two-Face for killing his family adds what emotional weight the film has and establishes some commonality with Bruce Wayne, who initially became Batman to avenge his parents murder. In the interest of full disclosure, it probably also helps that for the better part of the early to mid 90's I had a bit of a Chris O'Donnell crush, between this movie, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Scent of a Woman and is something that reignites any time I watch any of those films.  We also have Nicole Kidman as the tragically underwritten Chase Meridian, who basically exists to throw herself at Batman and/or Bruce Wayne and be a damsel in distress. I feel like they could have done more with her character and is kind of wasted in the final film, which is disappointing. 

Much has been made of Joel Schumacher as director, and by Batman fans specifically how bad of a director he is. I respectfully disagree, he can be quite good when the material suits him, with such directorial efforts as St. Elmo's Fire, The Lost Boys, Flatliners, and his John Grisham adaptations of both The Client and A Time to Kill being very good films. He certainly brought he own sense of style to the film and delivered a lighter, more kid friendly Batman movie, which is exactly what he was hired by Warner Brothers to do. Is Batman Forever a bad movie? Not really, it's just very different than the two films that preceded it. It's a fluffy confection as opposed to the meatier and more fulfilling previous films. It didn't work as well for others and that's fine. I still enjoy the film, but agree it could be better if it found a better balance between the humor and the more serious aspects to be something closer to the first Tim Burton Batman movie. But still, the nitpicks with this movie, especially the campy humor, would only carry over and be amped up even higher in the next movie, which has led to this one being lumped in with that trainwreck.

Overall, Batman Forever has a lot of nostalgia for me. It's the one I saw the most times growing up. I enjoyed it then and I still enjoy it now, even if the flaws are more apparent and it certainly does favor style over substance. But even in that context, maybe a little lightweight Superhero themed eye candy isn't so bad once and awhile.