Yes kids, it can be fun to play in the dark!!!

Rating: 10/10 (26 July 2003)

I loved the summer of 1992 for one reason and that reason was Batman Returns. Tim Burton had reached the pinnacle of direction and was just a year a way before he would reach it as a producer with Nightmare Before Christmas. This, more than the original Batman and Edward Scissorhands cemented the director's legacy in Hollywood as the "Gothic Director of Pop Culture". Looking back this is GREAT for lovers of TIM BURTON FILMS but BAD NEWS FOR LOVERS OF THE FIRST TWO BATMANS.
You see with a combine effort many critics, so-called Batman fans who actually had not read a comic book in over 20 years, and neurotic parents joined forces to bury this film. There were claims of it being too dark, too morbid, and too vulgar. The last complaint really upset me because the movie's innuendos were no more potent than a 1960's James Bond film. Because of these complaints and the fact that the sequel was not the success that the original Batman had been, even though it still made over 160 million dollars domestically, Warner Brothers decided to go in a lighter direction with the following two sequels.
Everything in this film works. It plays up on the theme of the original Batman film, that the so called "normal world" can be a scary freaky place and that in it your hero is more likely going to be some ordinary guy with problems, trying to save the day for his own personal and some times disturbing reasons. Nothing against the other super hero movies but that is what made the Batman movies cool and Tim Burton knew it.

The look of this film is more a Burton and designer Bo Welch creation than a traditional comic book setting but the same can be said about Anton Furst's sets designs in the first Batman. Once again the film makers took the spirit of the comic book worlds of roof top battles and brought into a film-noir world that worked on the big screen.
Now one complaint I can sympathize with NON-BURTON critics is with the Penguin. It seems that Burton and screenwriter Daniel Waters simply took the character's comic book name and disregarded everything else about him. Instead of the comic book creation, we get a villain that could have come out of any horror flick. I can understand the aggravation that some true to the bone Batman fans might have felt over the Penguin but it also forces me to ask those fans a question. How else would you make a villain such as the Penguin, who is fat and short, an entertaining match for Batman? The way Tim Burton approached the Penguin was the only way it could work outside of turning the villain into a mob boss and the first Batman had pretty much done the whole mob thing.
As for Catwoman, if you had a problem with either Tim Burton's spin on the character or Michelle Pfeiffer's performance than you are just not a very good judge of movies. Catwoman was definitely a strength in Batman Returns. I would have loved if Tim Burton would have gotten to make the Catwoman movie. It was the director who first brought it up but Warner Brothers dragged their feet and it looks highly doubtful that Burton will be involved or if even the film will ever be made.
I love Batman Returns. It's a great Tim Burton movie. Unfortunately it sparked an end to Burton's reign as Hollywood's golden director. A year later the over-rated Spielberg would recapture the title and Joel Schumacher would be named the director of the third Batman. The movies were never the same after that.
Still all is not wrong with the world. The third Batman was decent but the fourth one was horrible, and Tim Burton would go onto make entertaining films such as Sleepy Hollow. But still I wish movies would get back that quirky, imaginative, and sometimes dark edge that has been largely missing in movies in recent years.