It’s Schuemacher’s first, and while it is way, way, way better than “Batman & Robin“, it doesn’t come too near Burton’s two Batman films. First of all, let’s have a looksie at Batman himself, and his alter ego Bruce Wayne. Val Kilmer does a decent enough job as Batman (but then again, like I said, doing a good Batman doesn’t seem like that hard a job), posing nicely, and stuff like that, but I’m not too convinced by his Bruce Wayne. Obviously, Keaton’s was a tough act to follow, seeing as his Wayne is my favourite in all the Batman movies I’ve seen, so Kilmer’s task wasn’t too easy. And I think he did the part nicely enough, but there was nothing spectacular or anything about it; he seemed less excentric, in a way, than both earlier and later Waynes. They had a semi-interesting gimmick going, with Wayne having all these dreams and repressed memories from the time just after his parents’ deaths, but I didn’t think they did enough out of it. It may be that they tried to present us with a tormented Bruce Wayne, torn between his two persona, and although I might grudgingly admit that it enhanced the character somewhat, thus being relatively successful, I felt that the entire thing had been cut short. It seemed as if they didn’t dare to take this the whole way, and so Wayne’s “epiphany” about his dreams didn’t really contribute anything to the tale, leaving what could have been an interesting trait as little more than a whole lot of boring backwaters. In other words, Bruce Wayne’s dreams could easily have been cut, without the film suffering from it.
When it comes to Robin/Dick… well, I have such irrational antipathies against Chris O’Donnell, with him being such a lousy actor and all, that I didn’t quite manage to take Robin seriously. When the character on top of this is portrayed in a somewhat unrealistic manner — as an example, Dick seems completely untouched by the death of his family, except from when he’s displaying his righteous anger and his vengeful nature — I end up being not very impressed.
The rest of the film is fairly decent as well, with most of the cast doing good jobs — with the exception of Michael Gough, Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey, who are better than merely “good” — in playing characters who can’t really measure up to the ones in “Batman Returns” or “Batman Begins”. The plot was completely OK, I didn’t have anything against it in particular, and there weren’t really anything about it I liked more than other parts. Which is basically what I’d say about the entire rest of the film as well.
Nothing special about this one, and as I felt very charitable when giving it a 6.0/10 in my film log, I think I’ll deflate it somewhat, ending up with a 5.5/10, a grade I feel reflects it mediocrity in a nice way.
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