OH NO IT’S BOILING ACID
Yes, it is that time. Time for Forever. Honestly, I never liked this film. While the two Burton films I enjoyed as a child (and I even kind of sort of like the first one still), this one bored me to death even when it first came out. I remember pondering whether it must have been some sort of mass hysteria that drove people to think this was actually worthwhile viewing. Maybe it was just the soundtrack album that lent it some undeserved aura of cool. That was a great soundtrack. It had that great Offspring cover of The Damned’s “Smash It Up” and like, The Flaming Lips, and The Devlins back before they did the theme song to Six Feet Under, and Mazzy Star and PJ Harvey and that awesome Massive Attack song, and Sunny Day Real Estate and a weird-ass Michael Hutchence version of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” and best of all, “There Is a Light” by Nick Cave.
What? Oh yeah. This movie. Well, a couple of those songs crop up bizarrely in the movie, but mostly it’s free of anything of worth. So let’s just jump right into the pool.
The credits roll. A Tim Burton Picture. Wait. Really? Tim Burton was tangentially involved in this shitstorm? Do you think perhaps this was a ploy to seriously toilet the franchise so his films looked much better by comparison? A Joel Schumacher Film> OH GOD KILL IT KILL IT NO HE IS THE RUINER OF WORLDS. < ugggghhhh. I think the titles are intended to glide and swoop like bats, with the way they sort of just Scala Multimedia digital on and off frame, but it doesn’t come off so well.
During this, Batman’s putting on his costume and it looks… kinda bad. Like he’s putting on a leather bondage outfit, and it feels like he’s doing it for an audience. Kinda… creepy… And then the always-great Michael Gough pops up out of the shadows to utter the film’s immortal first words: ‘Can I persuade you to take a sandwich with you, sir?’
‘I’ll get drive-thru,’ says Batman. Greeeeeaaaaaat. Wait a minute, you’re not Batman. I recognize those lips! You’re Doc Holliday! What the hell’s going on?
OH HOLY HELL NEON EVERYWHERE MY EYES. Wasn’t Gotham all black and like, uh, gothic last time out? Couple years ago? Also, it looked like a real place, and not a video game? This looks like Neo-Tokyo as designed by sixth-graders in 1992. I’ve got nothing against colour and I straight-up love neon lights, but this is more than a bit much. It looks like we should be watching a crappy adaptation of a Broadway musical. Not least because the buildings all look like cheap cardboard backdrops. Wasn’t this a high-budget picture? Did they spend it all on moon pies and pennywhistles and from the looks of it, crack cocaine?
We cut to Two-Face flipping an enormous fake coin, the size of his palm. That can’t be right. Oh, okay, it was just that one shot and they didn’t mask it properly, because the rest of the film he has a normal-sized one. Arrrrghh Tommy Lee Jones noooo. Look, I like Tommy Lee Jones but he’s far from a good choice for Two-Face. Tommy’s at his best playing characters with a single-minded determination, whether they’re an anti-JFK Cuban agitator or a ruthless FBI agent. The fractured emotional dualism of Two-Face? Get the fuck outta town. Actually, the problem is not so much that Tommy Lee isn’t that great in the role, but his outfit is just fucking crazy bad. Neon orange with tiger stripes? Did they change his origin story to him getting bit by a radioactive transvestite? He looks like a very poorly conceived idea for a pro wrestler.
Outside, Batman wire-fu’s in on a really bad deux-ex-machina style straight line to this film’s new Miss Blonde Love Interest Chick (this time out played by Nicole Kidman at the height of lifelessness) and they just kind of stare at each other for a moment before she says ‘Hot entrance.’ Ugh. Well, we knew this film wouldn’t be subtle when Leatherdaddyman was putting on his outfit TO THE EXTREME while Joel Schumacher’s name was announced. At first guess, I’d assume the woman is yet another reporter, but apparently she’s a psychiatrist. Oh, Christ, the people behind this film have the sort of touch that would make someone who deals in psychology and the mind a buzzword-spouting idiot who psychoanalyzes everyone she meets without any regard to professional propriety or any human logic. I can’t wait, I’m like on the edge of my seat. Turning to good ol’ Pat Hingle as Commissioner Gordon, Batman asks ‘Two-Face?’ Chase Meridian (that’s the woman’s name, Chase Meridian. Chase Meridian! It’s the name of a bank, not a person!) sighs ‘exposition exposition exposition’ or anyway that’s all I hear and it hardly matters because it’s clear that all she’s thinking about is getting into them leather bat-pants. No joke, she’s looking directly at his crotch while she’s talking. Then she refers to Batman as a superhero (nudge nudge wink wink knowwhatimean knowhatimean?) which y’know, he’s not, but whatever and then says ‘I could write a whole book on a man who dresses up like a flying rodent’ which is really forced-sounding, but then I’m still fresh to this movie from real life and I’m not inured to completely false-sounding dialogue yet. ‘Bats aren’t rodents, doctor,’ Batman replies, which is kind of pissy and grade-school for a… eh… ‘Superhero’ to be saying. They aren’t, true, but it’s kind of a popular colloquialism. Anyway, for some reason she replies to that with ‘Really? You are interesting.’ I disagree. I would go with stilted, inane, banal, even jejune, before I’d go with interesting.
Then he walks away while she’s introducing herself and looking in totally the opposite direction for reasons that are unclear to me. ‘Do you have a first name or do I just call you Bats?’ she asks. No and no, thank you. Then she looks around like she’s flabbergasted at his disappearance, but seriously, he just turned and walked away, you were chatting away to the opposite direction of the person you were talking to. Shouldn’t that say something psychologically about you? Oh, and where would we have gone? How about to fight this big crime thing that you’re all standing around gawking at? Maybe?
And wait, wait, wait, hang on for a second anyway. Batman just ballets on in and chats with the chief of police on a crowded, brightly-lit city street and this is a thing that’s perfectly okay? Also, everything’s in neon and Two-Face is inside setting an obvious Batman-death-trap? I must have accidentally put in an episode of the 1966 Batman TV series, I’m sorry. No, hang on, this doesn’t have great go-go rock music, isn’t any fun at all, and looks like Batman Meets Wrestlemania as envisioned by Julien Temple. Something must have gone wrong somewhere, let’s review for a moment…. Oh, here’s your problem. You’ve got Joel Schumacher in there. No, it can’t be fixed, you’re going to have to scrap the whole thing.
Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, Two-Face is inside sticking a terrible actor/security guard in a vault as bait for Batman (leather-batman can always be counted on to go for the anonymous sex with random low-paid people bound with ropes). ‘Let’s start this party with a bang!’ he says and a wrecking ball crashes through the wall directly behind him which is stupid for one, and for another is clearly supposed to look cool but it’s done with bad video slow-mo effects and it looks really bad.
Gadfuckingzooks. Listen, my ‘creative process’ if you can call it such a thing with these movie reviews is as follows: I take notes watching a movie, hitting pause and noting down anything that irks or irritates me (or in the case of movies better than this one, which includes most films, things that I enjoy). I am only a few minutes into this film, the credits are in fact still rolling. It has taken over half an hour and I’m on my second page of notes.
Harvey Lee Jones summoning his troops here is straight out of the ‘66 Batman, which, yeah, I get it, it’s the idea driving this movie. It just doesn’t work. I mean, for starters, it ain’t 1966 anymore, and furthermore, this isn’t kitschy ephemera, it’s a million dollar extravaganza playing at being cheap bubblegum trash, but it’s too slick and too modern, even as shoddily constructed as much of it is. Instead of the relatively sly camp of old, it’s like a drunk nudging you going ‘hurrr ya get it, geddit huh huh?’ for two hours. Dutch angles and bright colours everywhere too. It’s like the telephone game hamstrung the creative process of this movie. They had a vague description of what that old series was like and somehow it turned into this monstrosity.
Moving on. Two-Face’s goons have tommyguns with neon red ammunition clips, and Batman has exactly the same affair in blue, but instead of bullets, his fires bad cgi effects. I think it’s supposed to be… taser… capsules. Like a bullet made of lightning. It’s like they want to have it both ways – campy silliness so you can excuse the dumb stuff and over-the-top or completely absurd things, but with big fight scenes and intensity. Does not come off at all. Oh, but wait, it’s the best part of the movie. Batman gets into the vault hanging on a chain and it starts filling up with a clear fluid. ‘What is that?’ you might think and the answer is ‘OH NO IT’S BOILING ACID!’ Brilliant. Brilliant. Thank you terrible security guard actor. You have provided the film with the best unintentionally hilarious moment in the film, although Batman should still probably let you die, or dissolve or whatever. Batman gets them out of it by firing a bat-hook THROUGH a thin wall that looks like it’s made of plywood and cuts the chain holding up the vault (which I might add just crashed through a much thicker concrete wall) and the plywood and hook holds it up just fine and it swings exactly back into the spot it was before, so co– ah fuck it, this is just an idiotic movie.
So Batman gets up the chain to Two-Face’s helicopter and there’s some lame quipping and all that. Kilmer is very wooden as Batman – he has none of the comic silliness of Adam West, the sly kookiness that drove Michael Keaton, the suave assholeness of George Clooney (despite the even worse film that surrounds him), nor the dramatic intensity of Christian Bale. He plays this movie like a mannequin in a series of dorky costumes. Tommy Lee Jones is just a joke as Two-Face though. It’s like he was written by a third-grader, although they do manage a stray bit of pathos here and there for him. In any case, he brings the helicopter down and Two-Face gets away and who cares really whatever, I just watched it and I’ve already forgotten what happened.
We get a city flythrough that is straight out of that old cg show Reboot to introduce – da-d-d-daaaaaa – Jim Carrey. Okay, Jim Carrey is a good choice for The Riddler. Honestly. They even do him pretty well at times, apart from really magnificently bad costuming choices later on. It fits that he’s more or less just a deranged fanboy, because it gives some drive to why he wants to leave clues and obsesses over the idea of Batman/Bruce Wayne following his every word. It’s not menacing in the least, but given that this movie wouldn’t handle that anyway, there’s no need for it to be. Unfortunately, like absolutely everything in this film, they overplay it. A lot. Well, that’s except Kilmer as the most boring, cardboard cut-out Batman/Bruce Wayne ever. My buddy Geoff has a cardboard Batman cut-out in his apartment and lit right, it would be more convincing.
So Bruce visits the office where Edward Nigma (The Riddler – E. Nigma, get it get it get it) works because it’s a Wayne Enterprises workplace, and Nigma is just way too into him and he gets a bit skeeved out and goes back to his office, where he has this… bat-capsule… thing where he leans back in his office chair and presses a thing and then he drops into something like a human-sized mail tube that takes him to the Batcave. That’s moronic. High-tech camp does not fly. Low-tech was the whole point of the thing.
Anyway, Batman goes to talk to Dr. Chase Meridian, who I hate, okay? Let me make this clear, I really hate Chase Meridian, she’s the worst character in this movie. She tells Batman how she’s all hot and bothered over him, which, hey Ms. Psychiatrist, examine thyself, okay? ‘It’s the car, right? Chicks love the car,’ replies Batman which makes me go all big frowny-face. Your banter sucks! Just, both of you, stop talking, this is painful and irritating. This movie needs that guy from the airplane scene in The Giant Claw, when the male and female leads of that were engaging in way too much terrible banter, and after sitting there in the background looking extremely annoyed for a while, leans over the seat and says ‘WOULD YOU TWO PLEASE SHUT UP?’ A lot of movies could use that guy.
Back at the office, Edward Nigma has a brain-sucking machine. That’s bullshit. I think it makes more sense and is more interesting if the failure of his invention has just driven him further insane, and his actions in the rest of the movie are just resulting from his total psychotic break. Back at his pad, uh oh wait hey, this is a Flaming Lips song. That’s so out of place. I like this song. Uh… Riddler is designing a costume for himself or something but he can’t come up with anything so he steals it off the mannequin in the fortune teller booth he keeps in his apartment. Actually, this is something I really like in the movie, it’s a sensible reason for him to have that costume, it fits as to how he would have a costume so quickly, and the fortune teller thing with it’s ‘yes’ and ‘no’ bulbs give him some kind of weird similarity to Harvey, because he too relies on this fate-deciding mechanism instead of real, adult, complex decision making. Of couse, they discard all of that before long, but for a moment, it’s got promise.
Back to Bruce and Chase. I really, seriously hate Chase. Every line is like salt in the eyes. Bruce sees a framed picture on the wall and notes that it looks like a bat, which obviously it does, but Chase says ‘That’s a rorschach blot. People see what they want to see.’ Listen, bitch. That is a bat. It’s framed, it’s on your wall, you’re obsessed with the Batman, don’t give me no shit about that not being a bat, because it is. Don’t make me drop some logic on your ass. I hate you so hard. So hard. Bruce says ‘I’ve really gotta get you out of those clothes’ and okay, fine, that’s pretty hilarious. The next line ruins it, but that was genuinely funny. One point.
Oh fuck hell dammit. Robin is in this movie. Chris O’Donnell? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo….
Hey, he’s already in the Robin costume. This means it won’t have to suddenly be manufactured later in the movie, right? There’s even a rational reason for it, it’s his trapeze outfit, which is perfectly reasonable. What’s inexplicable is WHY DID THEY CAST CHRIS O’DONNELL IN A MOVIE COME ON. Bruce Wayne is in the audience on a date with Chase Meridian (a date to the circus! Classy, Mr. Multibillionaire) and they’re trying to do a sort of Lois Lane/Superman/Clark Kent love triangle thing where a person is jealous of their other identity, but like the camp thing they just don’t get what made it work in the first place. Here’s a hint – it wasn’t bad acting and worse banter.
It turns out Two-Face is the circus ringmaster and it totally slipped Bruce by. World’s greatest detective my ass! By the way, and I know I’ve been on this already, but lord that Two-Face makeup is stupid. Since this is such a terrifyingly lousy film, I like to make up my own more intriguing storyline (as earlier with The Riddler, where he’s not getting smarter but just descending into madness), and I imagine that Harvey Dent was in these Batman films never all that ruined. Plastic surgery and skin grafts completely put him to normal but the traumatic stress of it drove him over the edge and he’s now actually just wearing absurd makeup and facepaint and making believe it’s all for real, as a way of excusing himself for his misdeeds.
Oh no! Robin’s three parents were killed! Apparently! That’s a tragedy of insane proportions, really, because one parent dying is one thing, and two parents even worse, but all three? Geez (okay, it turns out number three is his brother, but I must have missed that announcement earlier). Especially right after he saved all of the wealthy circus-goers in Gotham by disposing of the bomb while Bruce sat in the audience unable to act. Anyway, look, Robin (or Dick Grayson anyway) in this movie is like 25. Robin shouldn’t be fucking 25 years old! It’s creepy and nonsensical. He’s a troubled young man (named Dick!) who goes to live with a reclusive and offbeat bachelor who likes to dress up in leather at night so they can go out and tie people up. That’s not Batman, that’s Butt-man. The chief of police actually comes over to Wayne Manor and urges Bruce to take the kid in. What the… but… for… because like…a aaaaarrrgh fuck you fuck you. Come on! I know the Robin thing is a little silly to begin with, but Bruce takes him in because he’s an orphan who was raised in circus poverty and is targeted by the mafia. He can relate to the child’s trauma and he wants to teach him to defend himself against his enemies. He’s not a shit-cool dude in his twenties with a motorbike and a chip on his shoulder.
As it turns out, Dick doesn’t even want to stay with Bruce, which means, embarrassingly, that Bruce is going to coerce him into staying at his swingin’ pad. This is so wrong. But there is one great bit, where Bruce says to Dick, ‘I’m sure you’ll land on your feet,’ which is COLD AS ICE, man! Hey, I know while you saved the lives of all of this city’s leading citizens including myself last night at great risk to yourself, your parents fell to their grisly deaths right in front of you, but hey, you’ll probably LAND on your FEET, right? Ouch, dude. As The Joker says, ‘Very poor choice of words.’ Bruce’s rationale for letting Robin stay with him is pretty shaky and random, such that I shan’t repeat it here, anyway he stays because Bruce offers him a motorcycle which is just too pushing it, please, this whole thing just doesn’t seem right. Alfred comes up to his room and makes a horribly forced little speech ending with ‘broken wings mend in time. One day Robin will fly again. I promise.’ Cheeses Rice, don’t do that to Michael Gough, putting such idiot phrases in his mouth is insulting to us all.
Batman takes the Batmobile out and it’s horrible. The wheels don’t turn and there are little neon bat-signals on the hubcaps. That’s fucktarded, there isn’t another word for it. So is Two-Face’s lair, actually. There’s a line right down the middle of it and he has two chicks, and his chairs and tables are in the center of the room with a line down them and one half is kind of uhhh regal or something and the other side is all goofy evil. One of his women is dressed in a skimpy negligee and the other is in a leather dominatrix outfit. The Riddler drops in on him and is goofy and theatrical and dancing around and touching things, and I’d want to kill him too, let’s be fair. The goofy and theatrical really works for The Riddler character though. He’s manipulative, he’s an arranger, and he’s also a bit over the edge crazy and dying for everyone in the room to pay attention to him. That fits just fine and dandy. The hair is just stupid though. A neon orange brushcut? Really?
Oh, back at the mansion, dude – the awesome high-energy laundry-folding scene. Wow. That’s the gayest thing I’ve ever seen, and I have the complete works of Kenneth Anger on DVD. This movie is painfully nineties, and it is dated as hell. Anyway, Robin gets into the Batcave (through acrobatics! Yeah!) and steals the Batmobile. He may be called Dick Grayson and have that origin story (badly mismanaged as it is) but he’s totally the Jason Todd Robin, so by all means this movie should end with him being beaten to death with a crowbar. We’re all agreed on this then? Good.
Gotham is all black-lights and day-glo paint. Even the clothes of the street gangs and their graffiti. How helpful of them. Robin gets into a fight with some of them and Batman has to pull his ass out of the fire. I don’t care, let’s move on to the release party or whatever for The Riddler’s cool new product, which is 3-D television as a guise for his brain-sucking machine in everyone’s homes. Batman versus virtual reality it is then. Of course, it’s raided by Two-Face apparently right when Bruce’s mind is about to be read (although it turns out later actually they faked us out and it did get read) and Bruce escapes through some hidden personal escape hatch in the building. Then he re-enters as Batman and some drunk points and goes ‘BATMAN! Aaaaa!’ Y’know, like drunk cheering. Weird. In a good way, though, I think. Robin, meanwhile, grabs his trapeze outfit and heads out to go help. In the fracas at the release party, Chase Meridian (that’s a stupid name, too, I cannot state this enough) kisses Batman and makes a date for sex later, apparently.
Then Batman jumps off the roof straight down into a manhole where Two-Face happens to have set a fiery death trap. Convenient? No, utterly ludicrous. Old School in a similar scene had more dramatic integrity and that was a scene based around cock injury humour. Batman is apparently consumed by fire and buried alive, but is unharmed by both, in a scene that shows again that it’s trying to do the winking and nudging camp without the winking and nudging which DOES NOT WORK QUIT IT. Robin comes and saves him and now he’s gonna be his partner and fight crimes together and go to bed together and it’ll be rainbows and happy chocolates. Chris O’Donnell suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. When he says he’s gonna be ‘Batboy… or… Nightwing… or I dunno, your new partner!’ his face is all up in the camera’s grill like he’s just bearing down on the audience with his in-your-face awfulness and you just want to dismember him and build a fort out of his constituent parts. Anyway, Batman’s got more important makeout sessions to attend to and he goes to meet with Chase and she’s like ‘I’ve met someone’ and oh god no Batman turns to the camera and SMIRKS. GAWD NO! AAAAGH.
So then um Batman… quits. Because… Robin wants revenge… and… Chase wants sex with Bruce Wayne. Er… wait, what? There’s not one part of that where this makes sense. Chase comes over to the mansion to drop some roses on the floor and trigger a plot point, uh, I mean a psychotic episode, uh wait no, a memory of his parents death so that Bruce can remember what drives him and become the bat once again. Well, it’s a good thing, I was getting worried there in those two minutes where he wasn’t. By the way, him retelling his origin story (to Chase Meridian, no less) as if it’s a repressed memory is truly asinine, especially in the context of this way goofy movie. Oh, and here’s where it’s revealed that The Riddler did copy Bruce’s mind onto a CD or something and knows now that he’s Batman, so they show up at his house on Halloween night with a trick-or-treat gag and get into the mansion and OH SHIT NO it’s the skintight Riddler costume now oh Jesus no please don’t this is awful this is wrong, what were they thinking? Not only that, but they constantly have him thrusting his crotch at the camera and saying lines like ‘Spank me!’ and ‘JOYGASM!’ Oh horrible day.
They knock Batman out, destroy the Batmobile, and kidnap Chase. In other and more interesting news, The Riddler has this wicked sweet Riddler signal that uses the bat-signal as the period. I dig that, even if it’s kind of poorly realized. Oh but what the fuck now Robin has a molded-plastic Robin costume to match Batman’s, that Alfred made somehow for some stupid reason. None of that makes a lick of sense and it looks so bad. Oh my god and he also just said he was to Batman ‘not just a friend.’ Oooooooh-er. They take the Batboat and Batplane over to Two-Face’s place to go fight him and The Riddler, but Batman stops on the way to give a thumbs-up to the mayor. Fuck this movie, seriously.
‘Holy rusted metal, Batman!’ Oh, don’t do this. ‘Huh?’ No, don’t encourage the idiocy, please. ‘The ground, it’s all rusty,’ No I mean it, don’t. ‘…and full of holes.’ Stop, I’m serious. ‘y’know, hole-y.’ FUCK YOU MOVIE, FUCK YOU IN YOUR EAR CANAL TIL YOU DIE.
Anyway, we’re nearing the end and I hate this so much right now I’m going to skim over the rest. Robin has a lame moral victory wherein he beats up but does not kill Harvey, then Harvey pulls a gun on him, because Robin doesn’t have the brains to properly incapacitate him. Batman is meanwhile fighting The Riddler, and he (Batman) has some wicked rocket-boots. Riddler, on the other hand, has even more ridiculous hair, a glittery silver skating outfit, and a big throne, and he REALLY NEEDS TO QUIT THRUSTING AT THE CAMERA. Anyway, since they’ve caught Robin now and apparently had this all brilliantly planned, they have one of those clichéd ‘you can only save one of them’ scenes with Robin and Chase, where Batman gets out of it by uh… blowing up… a thing? After some unrelated riddle about ‘blind as a bat’ because I guess he needed to beat the Riddler at his own game or something, so… kudos… and The Riddler loses his super brain power somehow (it has nothing to do with neural connections it turns out, it’s some external hard drive and I guess it crashed), and Batman saves both of them of course, then in a total asshole move throws a whole bunch of coins at Harvey which makes him fall to his death and pisses Robin right off, which I’d agree with, but still, y’know, good, because fuck you, Chris O’Robin.
Denouement, with Riddler locked up in Arkham Asylum with a serious fear of bats now, I think, and also he went differently insane and forgets that Bruce is Batman. Convenient? No, fucking stupid. Bruce has revealed his identity to Chase, of course. Why does he do that in all of these movies? At least in Returns it wasn’t intentional. Okay, that’s it, I’m done. END.
Favourite Character: The Riddler, I guess, although with huge reservations. He at least is well-cast and has some logic to his characterization.
Favourite Scene/Moment: Uh wow, this is hard. There’s so nothing to choose from. The scene where Robin’s family is killed and Batman is useless? It’s not a good scene, but it’s no worse than the rest and it damages the already ruined credibility of Batman. Sure.
Favourite Line: Need you ask? “OH NO! IT’S BOILING ACID!” Oh, security guard. You are love.
A lot of movies could so use that guy!