Batman – The Anthology Marathon

The first of the modern Batman flicks, Tim Burton‘s 1989 film reinvents Gotham City as a nightmare hell of neon and garbage in which there are rumours that a blood-drinking bat creature is preying on the city’s underworld. Meanwhile, psychotic hoodlum Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson) gets accidentally dumped into a vat of toxic chemicals, turning him into the green-haired, white-faced, eternally grinning Joker. Elsewhere, crusading reporter Kim Basinger thinks there’s something rather odd about offhand millionaire philanthropist Michael Keaton, who keeps all kinds of goodies stashed in the cave under his mansion. All the ingredients are familiar, but they’d never previously been stirred together quite like this. Nicholson spurts inventive one-liners, Keaton acquits himself remarkably well, and, despite the odd flaw (what are those rotten Prince songs doing on the soundtrack?), it’s full of imaginative violence, astonishing sets and good rethinkings of the origins of familiar characters.

Burton’s hugely successful, incredibly grotesque sequel opens with a deformed baby being flushed down the sewers by Pee-Wee Herman and proceeds to deal with three characters so twisted and malformed by family circumstances, urban life and emotional stress that they adopt animal totems and dress up in fetishistic costumes to torture each other. Danny DeVito‘s slimy Penguin replaces Jack Nicholson’s Joker and conspires to get elected Mayor and ruin Gotham city, while poor old Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) is intrigued by Catwoman, the new vigilante on the block, who’s actually a put-upon secretary (Michelle Pfeiffer) with a compulsion to strap on the rubber suit and take a whip to anyone who gets in her way. The plot straggles from one unbelievable silliness to the next, with plenty of heavy duty S&M action, producing a tighter, more imaginative and affecting film than the original, well worth fifty million dollars (1992 prices) of anyone’s money.

Joel Schumacher took over from Tim Burton for the third film, Batman Forever, which is where most enthusiasts agree the rot set in until Christopher Nolan resuscitated the franchise. Still, at least Val Kilmer, making his one and only appearance in the rubber suit, can content himself with the knowledge that he wasn’t as bad as George Clooney, who took over for the series’ nadir, Batman and Robin.

And guess what? That’s next in this eight-hours-plus Batmarathon. Clooney and Arnie Schwarzenegger’s wise-cracking villain Mr. Freeze are thoroughly upstaged by Uma Thurman’s scene-hogging turn as Poison Ivy, a meek botanist-turned-deranged vegetable liberationist who can kill with the merest snog. The rest of the thin plot has Batman and Robin bickering about who gets top billing, their faithful manservant Alfred feeling peaky, and Elle Macpherson standing around looking like a lemon. Like its Schumacher-directed predecessor, this eschews Tim Burton’s darker vision to present a succession of soulless yet impressive set-pieces driven by a constant exchange of occasionally amusing one-liners, which the scriptwriters offer in lieu of dialogue

They’re all back on screen in 4K remastered form to mark the first film’s 30th anniversary and the 80th anniversary of Batty’s first comicbook appearance.