Batman Forever
First screened in June 2025
Director: Joel Schumacher. Cast: Val Kilmer, Jim Carrey, Tommy Lee Jones, Nicole Kidman, Chris O'Donnell, Pat Hingle, Michael Gough, Drew Barrymore, Debi Mazar, Elizabeth Sanders, René Auberjonois, Jon Favreau. Screenplay: Lee Batchler, Janet Scott Batchler, and Akiva Goldsman (based on a story by Lee Batchler and Janet Scott Batchler and on characters created by Bob Kane).

 In Brief:  Some energy and technical skill on display here, but everything from script to edit is chaotic in Riddler-ish ways.

VOR: ③  Both a significant mile marker toward the color-soaked bombast of modern superhero movies and an outlier from their grandiosity. Thin but noteworthy.


   
Photo © 1995 Warner Bros./PolyGram Filmed Entertainment
"Is it possible there's an aspect of your parents' death that you haven't faced, and you were so young when it happened." Imagine making Nicole Kidman say exactly this, word for word, in the 64th minute of Batman Forever, an expensive movie with three screenwriters. I think a question mark was intended halfway through, but she doesn't read it that way. Anyway, the syntax is barely less broken if these are punctuated as separate lines.

A lot of Batman Forever feels like this, edited into a jumble even in intervals when the pace isn't hyperkinetic. The opening implies an absent reel beforehand. The film grammar is as haphazard as the spoken grammar, as if something longer is now missing a random sampling of excised beats and moments, and as if a fairly straightforward remit (Batman is back, and Batman is—forever!) has been rendered needlessly strange (Back from...where? Did the two Burton movies happen? Are there two villains or four, or...?). Riddle me this, indeed.

You don't have to know about Tommy Lee Jones's famous feud with Jim Carrey to see it up there on screen, where it's the most interesting antagonism on offer. Carrey's undisciplined showmanship puts Jones in the impossible position of either awkwardly joining the same clownish frequency or holding back and giving a tonally berserk film yet another series of incongruous notes. You can see Jones resenting all this, even when he's trying to go along. Everything about Robin is beyond bizarre, and Chris O'Donnell is not the actor to sell it. Bruce, as so often, is simultaneously overburdened with a twenty-ton traumatic backstory and given nothing to play. Everybody else seems like an idiot for not piecing together that Bruce and Batman are the same guy, but I have this fantasy that everyone in Gotham already knows and has been knowing except the other major characters. (En Vogue obviously knows. They're stuck playing hookers in a barely acknowledged, millisecond, allergenic walk-on, but they're not dumb.)

I spent a whole summer at McDonalds giving away Batman Forever (faux) glassware alongside McChickens and Filets-o-Fish. Three months of ever-presence ("Could I swap my Two-Face mug for a Chase Meridian?", which I honestly would have asked as well) had dulled my interest in actually seeing it. Which is too bad, because at least Joel Schumacher and Co. are taking a risk: embracing the unfettered pop colorism of comic books without rendering it as joyless, overemphatic affectation, the way Dick Tracy did. I can see where cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt's job would have been difficult and his solutions inventive, with so many dramatic light/shadow effects and such loud, competing color schemes crowded on purpose into the same frames. I can understand his Oscar nomination without quite co-signing it. I can see Val Kilmer is eager to plumb into Bruce's clotted anomie and ambivalence about sex, though the context makes such earnestness seem ill-considered, like someone trying to do a forward double pike into a plastic wading pool. Elliot Goldenthal is, natch, unafraid of drama, and if I were more musically literate I might find something to praise there.

Batman Forever is listless, arrythmic, and tacky without, at least, being ponderous or over-violent or no fun to watch. That's the best I can do. I guess my question [sic] for these filmmakers is, "Is it possible there's an aspect of Batman's story that hadn't by 1995 already been restaged to death, and you've tried so often." Christopher Nolan proves this question has more than one possible answer, and for that I credit him. Batman Forever, though, and this too I can credit, evokes an era where superhero movies were basically recognized as silly japes, even when a lot of money had been spent—wasteful and vulgar, but not without some zip or some pockets of technical proficiency. That mode strikes me as arguably preferable to their current incarnation as graven tablets soliciting exegetical scrutiny. So many strenuously furrowed brows these days, on and off the screen! Batman Forever is dumb and ill-shapen and at times brazenly embarrassing, but I don't really mind. I get why Schumacher wanted to try a new approach and I get why this cast and creative team were game, even though I don't think it worked out artistically. Grade: C+

Academy Award Nominations:
Best Cinematography: Stephen Goldblatt
Best Sound: Donald O. Mitchell, Frank A. Montaño, Michael Herbick, Petur Hiddal
Best Sound Effects Editing: John Leveque, Bruce Stambler

Golden Globe Nominations:
Best Original Song: "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me"
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