beats up the comic book genre

Rating: 6/10 (13 June 2007)

I decided to comment on this one after watching Batman Forever about a week ago. I have watched Batman Forever (B.F.) more than once; I have yet to rent Batman Begins.
What the team behind B.B. tried to do is a true revolution back to the ideas of Tim Burton's first Batman movie. Burton wanted to strip away the lumpiness that was layered into both the Adam West T.V. show (the "go go" set design), and the Comics (Batdog, Batboy, Batgirl). D.C. put out a great hard cover book on the history of Batman for better reference. And then, many people felt that the lumpiness was creeping back in even during the second movie, and the lumpiness may have damaged Batman and Robin. The team behind B.B. never considered that a heavy-handed treatment might be just as bad as having a "go go" fight sequence at a disco ice arena (or whatever it was supposed to be) in B.&R. There is a lot of mean-spiritedness in B.B. that does a lot of disrespect to the "comic" element of the stories. Tim Burton may have borrowed from Frank Miller, but he got more entertaining results than Brian (?) Nolan. There are some really cool parts to B.B., but the movie doesn't think that a plot to "microwave all of the water in the city" isn't ridiculous. Didn't Arnold (I mean) Mr. Freeze want to freeze all of the water? Wasn't that ridiculous? To wrap this up, a big problem with B.F. were the scenes with a guy standing in a full rubber suit talking to a psychiatrist, but the big problem with B.B. is that it replaces silliness (except for the Batmobile car chase) with scary meanness. Michael Caine, Christian Bale, and Morgan Freeman did a good job, though. Keaton is still the best.