Joel Schumacher is widely said to have ruined the Batman series when he took it over from Tim Burton, but really, this second Burton film is hardly less stupid than Schumacher's Batman Forever.  It has a much more exotic imagination, but for me that's not enough to carry a picture.  All believability is lost, the characters' knowledge and motivations are often inexplicable.  The original comic book was called "Detective Comics" for a reason: Batman, more than any other superhero character, used his intellect to fight crime.  In this movie, he simply knows things by magic.  (This phenomenon is often a sign of ham-handed editing by someone other than the director.  The original screenplay may have been much more coherent.)

In the end, despite its dark gothic tone, this movie is practically as campy as the '60s Adam West Batman.  Yet, this is the best of the four modern Batman films!  The gothic parody opening sequence, showing the re-imagined origin of the Penguin, is hilarious -- the camp aspect works very successfully in this brief segment.  Danny DeVito is excellent, as he always is.  The rest of it... bleh.  Michelle Pfeiffer's performance as Catwoman suffers from Madonna Syndrome: the sort of superficial vampy display of feminine allure that somehow thrills the women and girls in the audience while leaving the men cold.  (A particularly bad example of this syndrome can be seen in the film version of Charlie's Angels, but in that case it may have been intentional.)

Those who say it stinks relative to Batman Returns are doing it a disservice: I enjoyed this movie hardly any less, and it's not much goofier, except in tone.  And I was impressed that it actually does a good job with the character of Robin -- a role that very easily becomes laughable to a modern audience, though he was a big selling point to young comic fans back in the '40s.  Jim Carrey is an ideal choice for the Riddler.  Having said that the original Burton Batman is overrated, I guess I can say that this movie is underrated.

This does not mean that it's good.  The writing is ridiculous, the acting is childishly hammy, and the set design is silly and garish.  The first half hour in particular is very stupid and corny, almost as bad as its sequel, Batman & Robin.  Once we get to the circus scene where Bruce Wayne meets Dick Grayson, the thing pulls itself together somewhat and manages to suck less.

Val Kilmer may be considered more of a "real" actor than Michael Keaton, but if so he sure doesn't show it here.  If he shows any talent, it's one for crude mimicry: he replicates all the defects of Keaton's performance.  I'm reminded of the notorious scene in The Island of Dr. Moreau where he does a bad Marlon Brando impression, after Brando's character is dead.  Plus, the script calls for him to have a lot of masculine charisma, and he doesn't even measure up to Keaton in this department.  A role that fares even worse is that of Two-Face, played by Tommy Lee Jones.  It's terribly written and the makeup design is lame-o.

Visually the film is Schumacherized, but aside from excessive amounts of gaudy light-show, most of it is not too annoying or embarrassing yet.  The notorious rubber nipples on the Bat-suit make an appearance, but they're only on screen very briefly.  There are some other "gay signifiers", but they stay traditionally unobtrusive -- no big problem if you don't go deliberately looking for them.  This sort of feature will come into its own in the next movie.  The atmosphere is also getting a good deal more childish than the first two films, but again, not nearly as much as in the following film.

There may be nobody alive who agrees with me in ranking the first Batman almost as low as this one, so trust my opinion at your own risk.

No, wait -- I did find one reviewer who rates this higher than the other Batman movies... John Stanley.

Someone like George Clooney is who Tim Burton should have cast instead of Michael Keaton in the first Batman.  Clooney is an actor who is good at subtlety, at conveying much with little -- there would have been no "waterlogged tree stump" complaints with him in the role.  But here he's in a film that contains no subtlety whatever.  Welcome to the most thoroughly hated of all comic book films (typical fan comment: "Never have I been so physically angry at a movie") -- the movie that put the lucrative Batman franchise into a coma for nine years.

Apparently the reason Joel Schumacher's previous effort came out sort of okay was because Tim Burton was a producer and gave him some supervision.  But in this one, Schumacher was on his own, and finally got the chance to show us the true crapiste he could be when granted full creative control.  His work here earned no less than eleven Razzie nominations -- eleven! -- but won only in one category (Worst Supporting Actress: Alicia Silverstone).  The rival Stinkers awards were more generous: they gave this one Worst Film, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay as well as another Worst Supporting Actress for Silverstone, and placed it on their all-time bad film list, "100 Years, 100 Stinkers".  When a site called Grudge Match took a vote for all-time Worst Director, Schumacher won overwhelmingly, getting more votes than Ed Wood and William Shatner combined.

The essential problem with this film is not just that Schumacher is incompetent, or that the cast does a uniformly terrible job (except for Michael Gough as Alfred), or that the script rates a solid 9.8 on the stupid-meter, or even the ever-deadly syndrome of deliberate campiness -- even when Schumacher makes everything so flamingly gay that if you made a drinking game out of suggestively homerotic visuals, you'd never stay conscious until the closing credits... the essential problem is that somebody, God knows who, apparently made the decision to target this movie for an audience of young children.  They've turned Batman into something that belongs in an episode of Power Rangers.

They adjusted it for children in the worst possible way: by condescending.  By dumbing everything down as far as they could.  They started with the sort of corny dialog that was used in the old Adam West Batman show, and then decided that was too sophisticated.  So every bit of dialog is deliberately stupid, every action scene is deliberately unbelievable, and every acting performance is deliberately fake and hammy.  This is most obvious in the case of Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy, who couldn't possibly have delivered such a hammishly false performance unless she was ordered to.  In the case of Ahnuld as Mr. Freeze, of course, no special instructions were necessary.  I guess that's why they gave him top billing, ahead of Clooney.  (Whose own performance is bizarrely smiley... again, as if performing for small children.)

Sometimes, I swear, even the jokes are deliberately not funny.

Yes, that's what I'm forced to conclude about this movie: in essence, they set out to make it awful on purpose.  And boy did they succeed.  Sometimes this makes Superman IV look like a work of art they'd show at Sundance.  Just because somebody thought it would be a good idea to try to reach out to a younger audience.  Like, seven and under.  You really have to wonder how anyone in Hollywood, no matter how dumb, could possibly have decided this was a good marketing move.  And you also have to wonder a little bit about what kind of creep Schumacher might be to put that gay stuff into, of all places, a kids' movie.  I mean, from what I've seen of Schumacher's other work, he usually doesn't do anything of the kind in grown-up movies.  Fortunately, that target audience stayed home in droves... as did everyone else, despite the cast heavy with stars at their money-making peak.  It may have helped that the film ended up rated PG-13, in part for "innuendo".

And speaking of deliberateness, most of the louder sound effects are deliberately distorted with some kind of soft-clip effect... I suppose in an attempt to make them sound more powerful.  When watched at home, the effect will make many viewers start wondering if there's something wrong with their TV's audio.

Fortunately, most of the real awfulness comes in the earlier parts of the movie.  This is the case in several other bad comic book films -- ones where the whole approach has something disastrously wrong with it.  Once you get past the establishment of all the stupid ideas, the rest of the story can go along okay.  More or less.  In this case, the second half of the movie rises from a six year old level to maybe a ten year old level.  And I actually got involved in the action in the last quarter or so... largely because Ahnuld, being the only one trying to act at his best level (and for $25,000,000 he'd damn well better), carries his part with conviction and menace.

But no true Bat-fan can forgive them for how they trivialize the character of Bane.  In this story he's a puppet of Poison Ivy.  The original Bane made a puppet of her and a dozen other Bat-villains.

After decades of trying and failing, trying and failing, failing and more failing, DC Comics have finally produced a movie that is entirely successful, and equal to or better than the most successful efforts from Marvel, who box-office-wise have been kicking their butts for a decade.

I didn't have high hopes for this one going in.  The Joker, as a villain, is seriously played out ...or so I thought.  I was wrong.

When people look for fresh takes on overplayed characters, they often re-imagine them in new forms or settings.  Like how Shakespeare productions often like to move old plays to new settings -- put Hamlet on a spaceship or in fascist Italy or in an underground punk rock club.  They did that with the Joker -- instead of being a guy who turned white and green due to a chemical accident, he's now just a guy who has scars and slathers himself with weird makeup.  This could easily have been a complete failure, but they did something else.  Instead of making the Joker a fiendishly clever master criminal with a gimmick, they made him something much more frightening.  This Joker is essentially a terrorist.  And not the kind of terrorist who has a political agenda and turns to terror in the hopes of advancing it.  Someone for whom terror itself is the prime agenda.  He doesn't blow people up in order to gain power and wealth, he pursues power and wealth in order to blow people up.  The movie illustrates this with a surprisingly effective scene in which, having acquired a huge pile of cash, he sets it on fire.  When he threatens to blow up a hospital, his main goal in making the threat is superficially to extort something, but what he mainly seems to want is just to create even more panic and chaos than he would get by blowing up the hospital without warning.

Since the Joker is a terrorist, some have tried to read a conservative message about the War On Terror into this movie, as some do with 300.  I don't think that's justified.  For one thing, unlike 300 or 24, this movie is able to bring some actual sense of nuance to questions of how far we go in fighting evil.  For another, although the word "terrorist" is used, the consistent metaphor that the movie uses for the Joker is to compare him to a vicious dog.  (They even have him ride in a car with his head sticking out the window.)  A normal terrorist works to serve a political agenda, but the Joker sometimes doesn't seem to have any agenda at all -- he's simply acting on impulse, like an animal.

Alfred: "Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money.  They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with.  Some men just want to watch the world burn."

But maybe the key to what really makes this Joker scary is the already legendary performance by the late Heath Ledger.  Because the character, despite not being white and green, is still pretty dang improbable outside of comic book reality.  So the one thing that can make it stick is a great performance.

Actors have always loved villain roles, and so have audiences.  And unfortunately, villain roles and over-the-top ham acting have always gone together.  For me, even some of the most awarded and celebrated performances of villainy have been a bit too false and exaggerated.  For instance, Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.  Or Malcolm McDowell as Alex, in the opening section of A Clockwork Orange.  Both are, for me, too showy in their moustache twirling.  What do I consider a really fine performance as a villain?  How about Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith.  In my view, his performance is what makes the otherwise highly overrated Matrix movies.  And now I include Heath Ledger as The Joker.

The movie's story and plotting are also excellent -- far superior to its predecessor, Batman Begins.  There's a lot of story here, enough to burst the typical dumb action movie plot at the seams.  It covers a lot of ground.  There's enough plot here for two movies... in particular, the subplot about Harvey Dent / "Two-face" could have sustained a film of its own, and I do feel that unfortunately that character is treated rather too briefly here.  But though Two-face's story is condensed, it's solid, meaty drama.

The whole film is fairly solid drama.  It's not just about action (though there is a plentiful supply of that, and it isn't all obscure and muddy like before), but about people making hard choices.  The Joker delights in forcing people to choose between awful alternatives, and even without that, there are plenty of tough decisions to go around.

In this context, unfortunately, it's Christian Bale's Batman that starts to be the weak dramatic link.  In the lesser Batman Begins, he was adequate for the ambitions of the picture; here, not so much.  And god, that awful constiptated voice he uses when in costume.

At least the weakest link of the previous film, Katie Holmes, is gone.  They replaced her with Maggie Gyllenhaal.  It's as if the Rachel Dawes character suddenly matured by ten years (and spent those years learning to act).  If only she'd been in the first film... her scenes here might have worked much more richly with that to build on.  And fortunately, Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon gets much better material this time, becoming a much more fully realized character than he was in the preceding film.

My one other complaint is Hans Zimmer's score -- a shapeless boring pablum of generic thudding and chugging "dramatic tension".  The film deserved something far richer and deeper.

On a final note, I'll just say that it's impressive how grisly they managed to make this while still getting a PG-13 rating.  This is not any candy-colored lighthearted romp through the funny pages.