Film
Batman/Batman Returns
- Director
- Tim Burton
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 252 mins
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.
They’re both 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. The two, er, somewhat less revered Joel Schumacher Batman flicks are also getting 4K makeovers.
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