Batman Forever Review
We are in week number 5 of my review series of reviewing Batman movies leading up to The Batman. Today we are talking about the 1995 movie, Batman Forever. So…how is this movie? Let’s get started!
The Good:
What this movie did right was give us a lot of time with Bruce Wayne as a character. Some of the issues with Batman the Movie, Batman (1989), and Batman Returns are that it felt like the villains were on the front burner and Bruce Wayne was on the back burner. But this movie we get to spend a lot of time with Bruce Wayne an understand his physiological state of him dealing with his parents.
Also, some of the action in the movie is handled pretty well. It’s not great action these aren’t some of the most memorable action sequence in comic book movies. But there are plenty of action scenes are all of them are done very well. I’ve always liked the opening scene where Batman is rescuing guards from Two-Face.
Finally, the movie does move at a nice brisk pace from plot point to plot point. It’s a movie that is 2 hours and 1 minute long and it does move at a nice pace from plot point to plot point.
The Bad:
While some parts of this movie are good this is a movie that has lot of issues with it. First up, the performances here across the board aren’t the best. Val Kilmer has been solid in other places, Top Gun and Top Secret! being two solid movies from him. But here he’s just giving a very wooden performance as Bruce Wayne, not once in this did I buy him as Bruce Wayne. Even Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones as the villains of the movie feel very much like 1995 performances. Those performances have not aged well in the year 2022. You even have Oscar winning actress Nicole Kidman as the love interest and I don’t know if this was early in her career or the script wasn’t great, but Kidman didn’t sell me as the lov interest.
Also, there are some significant story issues here like things happen but don’t really make much sense. The big one being is about 60% of the way through the movie Bruce Wayne stops being Batman because…we don’t know why The Riddler and Two-Face are causing a threat to Gotham City. This is probably due to the amount of content that was cut from this movie. It has been reported that there is a director’s cut for this movie that has about 30-40 minutes of extra footage and that probably could have fleshed out parts of the plot in a more coherent way.
Another issue with the movie is parts of The Riddler and Two-Face’s plan are very confusing. Now this might tie into one of my issues that I mentioned earlier. But the basic set up for there plan is The Riddler wanting to kill Bruce Wayne and Two-Face wanting to kill Batman. That is a basic set-up for a villain plan for this movie. But they have this whole idea that Edward Nygma wants to get all of people’s information form there head. So they make Edward a hero to Gotham so he can put a technology device in there house to extract information from there brain. It’s get very weird at points in time.
Also tied to the villains of the movie The Riddler’s motivation for wanting to kill people is becasuing Bruce Wayne disowned Edward’s idea which caused him to want to get revenge. This is a villain trope that has been used since this movie came out in The Incredibles, Iron Man 3, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and with it coming out in ‘95 it feels very dated and not a good usage of it.
Finally, Joel Sumacher’s attempt to make a campier verison of Batman just doesn’t work for me. The neon colors, the bat nipples, and bat butts aren’t very Batman like. Joel made the movie he wanted to make but not a movie that anybody really wanted.
Final Thoughts: Batman Forever is really the first dud that I’ve reviewed in this series so far. The acting, storytelling, writing, and direction for this movie really do hold this movie back from being a better movie. So you probably could have guessed but this movie will not be getting a good score from me.
The Score: 6.7/10 (D+)
Comments