Film
Batman Returns
- Director
- Tim Burton
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 126 mins
Tim 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.
It’s back on screen in 4K remastered form to mark the the 80th anniversary of Batty’s first comicbook appearance. Burton’s original Batman and the two, er, somewhat less revered Joel Schumacher Batman flicks are also getting 4K makeovers.
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