BATMAN FAILS TO TAKE FLIGHT

By Derek Malcolm

From The Guardian (London), 07.09.1992

There's no two ways about it. Tim Burton is a gifted and inventive director. Edward Scissorhands proved that. But neither Batman nor Batman Returns (Empire etc, 15) adds much to the evidence. They are just hits, missing their true mark by something like a mile, buried by extravagance and covered in hype.

If Batman seemed to be a constant tug of war between what Burton wanted to do and what his producers, Peter Guber and Jon Peters, demanded for commercial success, the second film, without the overweening if watchable presence of Jack Nicholson as the Joker, has more vision but less coherence. It looks like a gigantic fairy tale without a real centre for the imagination to catch upon. To be frank, it's often kind of dull.

This Gotham City is certainly darkly lit and shot as if determined to make its art deco settings almost but not quite Dickensian, a contradiction in terms which wouldn't matter if everything else was in place. Its detail is as elaborate as that of Anton Furst, the British designer whose death prevented him working on it and who provided the one true pleasure of the first film.

But the cinematography rarely takes flight (there's a difference between something looking good and being used effectively) and the comic strip characters remain obstinately uninvolving, moving through a plot that's confused enough to prevent any of them achieving more than momentary prominence.

If Nicholson stood too long leering at us in the spotlight, Danny DeVito's screeching Penguin, unrecognisable in his flubbery outfit and virtual face mask, is a villain with one acting hand tied around his back, pitched against a curiously lacklustre Batman, now played by Michael Keaton with robot-like disengagement.

It is left largely to Michelle Pfeiffer's leathered-up Catwoman, the mousy secretary who turns into a Jekyll and Hyde vixen ("I am Catwoman. Hear me roar!"), and Christopher Walken as Max Shreck, the rapacious industrialist who thought he had dispensed with her services through the window of a skyscraper, to distract our wandering attention. Even they have a hard job getting out from under the scenery and the toy-oriented special effects.

Batman Returns resembles nothing so much as a blacker, spikier but less focused version of a Disney animation feature made flesh. No great surprise, perhaps, since Burton worked at that dream factory once. It's two hours and a bit of movie-making that looks as if it's been worked half to death. Better, perhaps, than the prosaically over-orchestrated Hook but unable to sustain the "liberation from plot into poetry" its supporters claim. Phantasmagoria has to be more magical than this, and possibly less mechanically oriented.

That said, one can see what Burton was striving for. The Penguin is the key--a stunted troll pushed into the sewer by his disgruntled parents who doesn't know whether he is a human being or an animal, but wants Gotham City's respect just the same.

He hates Catwoman, regards Shreck as a plastic villain, Batman as the trust fund goody-goody--as Shreck terms him--and himself as the real thing. Respect is due but he can't get it. Batman is just another fake in a mask.

The film is set at Christmas, the season of goodwill masking tension. His purpose is to provide it in tangible form. Anti Claus, in fact. The parable is supposed to be black enough to hurt just a little on its way towards entertainment.

But Daniel Waters' screenplay, "normalised" by Wesley Strick, whatever that means, tries for a warped edge to it that succeeds in seeming like flash irony rather than anything more holding, and it often can't be clearly heard behind Danny Elfman's score and the crash, bang, wallop of the rest of the soundtrack.

Alas, the Penguin remains more of a cardboard cut-out than a fish-and-blood character impersonating nightmares, and even the slightly surprising sexual passages between Batman and Catwoman (there's a lick rather than a kiss) seem more like sparring than the real thing.

Only the special effects impart the true liveliness the proceedings need, but that's par for too many courses nowadays to represent Burton adequately. Style and content have to match.

Maybe he was trapped in this enormous film, like many have been before him. Possibly, the fantasy has a slight case of Hollywood elephantitis. Whatever the reason, Batman Returns, for all its efforts at being different and better, remains beached in its clever settings and cheap psychological insights.

It's the kind of film which has great stills but never quite comes alive when it actually moves--likely to win at the box-office quicker than it does in the mind. Which, considering what Burton is capable of, may not ultimately be the best bargain, except on the way to the bank or the bargaining positions for the inevitable Batman III.