The movie (script credit to Lee Batchler Ey Janet Scott Batchler and Akiva Golds-man) does have somewhat more lilt and levity, much of it due to Carrey as the Riddler. But there’s still plenty of murk, physical and metaphysical, and more psychobabble about Bruce Wayne’s obsessions and repressions. The new hero, Val Kilmer, is younger, sexier, less cerebral than Michael Keaton but lacks Keaton’s undercurrent of complexity. When this Batman meets up with Nicole Kidman as brilliant, gorgeous psychologist Chase Meridian, the two banter like sparring libidos. HE: You trying to get under my cape? SHE: A girl can’t live by psychoses alone. HE: It’s the car. Chicks love the car. SHE (inspecting Batsuit): Mmmmmmm, black rubber.
This is fun, but it’s no big change: there was similar byplay between Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Cat woman in “Batman Returns.” The new film brings in Robin, Batman’s original sidekick. This Bat youth, whose presence in the comics generated heavy-handed comment about homosexual fantasy, didn’t appear in the first two movies. Is it too cynical to speculate that he’s been disinterred with the increasingly coveted gay audience in mind? Chris O’ Donnell as Robin sports a close-cropped head, long sideburns and an earring. Chew on that, you pop-culture iconographers!
It’s Batman’s evil adversaries that are crucial, and here the movie badly lets down Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face, the acid-scarred arch-fiend. Unlike Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the first “Batman,” Jones has little to do but cackle insanely and endlessly flip a coin, his method for determining his victims’ fate. Too much cackle-and-flip gets awfully wearing. Carrey’s Riddler is another story. This character effloresces from computer nerd to baroque superwacko, out to revenge himself for billionaire Wayne’s refusal to fund his machine that manipulates people’s brain waves. Carrey gets full range for his ability to turn psyehopathology in to a manic ballet. His high-tech mad scientist cavorts like a nut Nijinsky and twirls his cane like a cheerleader from hell.
“Batman Forever” needs the radioactive Carrey; much of the film is heavy and clunky. Batman’s hand-to-hand combats take place in muffling darkness; you can barely see the kung or the fu. In his rooftop flights you get a murky leap, a whooshing fall and a close-up of a hook clanking onto something. John Dykstra’s special effects are grandiloquent without being thrilling. The design elements are more successful. Barbara Ling’s Gotham City is a kitsch fantasia of actual New York, evoking a lost utopian vision that peaked in the 1989 World’s Fair. Bob Ringwood has sexed up the Batsuit, Schwarzeneggering the musculature, adding nipples; there’s even a close-up of a black-clad tush.
Burton’s Batflicks were flawed visions, but they were visions, using comics conventions to express contemporary chaos and anxiety. “Bat-man Forever” is slicker, more domesticated. Dr. Meridian may have seduced Bruce Wayne right out of super heroism: “I choose to be cured,” he tells her. This is a scary prospect. Can Bruce be Batman without his neuroses? Can there be a feel-good Dark Knight, clobbering evil with the smile of a well-integrated personality? Stay batty, Bruce.
