The Too Dark Knight

Rating: 4/10 (4 October 2011)

Tim Burton's first Batman film was widely praised, largely for its serious tone. Serious by comic book movie standards anyway. There was darkness and gloominess in that first film which Burton used to great effect. In Batman Returns Burton upped the ante on the darkness. He went really dark. I mean really, really dark. Way too dark for his movie's good. One can imagine thousands of happy young tykes bouncing into the theater excited to see a Batman movie only to come out two hours later crying their eyes out and headed for an appointment with a child psychologist. Fun for the whole family? Not this movie. This is more horror film than superhero saga. I guess when a movie begins with parents tossing their infant child into a river you can forget about it being a feel-good story. And when that child floats into a sewer and is rescued by penguins we know who our villain's going to be this time around.
So it's Penguin. And Burton's concept for this character sinks the movie. What a vile, disgusting creature. A sick, twisted, perverted little man whose diabolical plans, when finally revealed, are almost too awful to comprehend. It's the stuff of nightmares. If Burton was looking to frighten a whole generation of kids he probably succeeded. If he was looking to make a good movie he failed. The Penguin is a depraved character who makes the movie way scarier than any mass-audience comic book movie should be. And aside from the scares parents will probably want to be covering their children's eyes and ears with all the upfront sexual innuendo in the movie. "Mommy, what's poontang?" This is a Batman movie for crying out loud, you know kids are going to swarm to see it. But Burton made a movie with very grownup sensibilities. OK, so maybe it's too adult, maybe it's not what you really expect a Batman movie to be. But putting that aside there's still the fact that it's simply a bad movie.
You feel bad for Danny DeVito who, in playing Penguin, was given a character who wasn't salvageable. Penguin's not the only villain though. There are a couple more and they largely fail too. Michelle Pfeiffer plays Selina Kyle who is of course destined to become Catwoman. How exactly does Selina become Catwoman? Quite ludicrously. Pfeiffer makes the most of what she's got to work with. Catwoman's got her moments which is more than you can say for Penguin who is an off-putting, grotesque abomination from start to finish. Then there's powerful, corrupt Gotham businessman Max Shreck. The best thing that you can say about this character is that he's played by Christopher Walken, who always brings his own unique touch to any film. But Shreck's not particularly interesting, has no backstory to give us a reason to care about him, and he disappears for large portions of the film. Three villains in this case don't add up to much. And oh by the way Michael Keaton's Batman again. Keaton was largely overshadowed by Jack Nicholson's Joker in the first film. But, both as Batman and perhaps more crucially as Bruce Wayne, Keaton contributed a great deal to the first film. Here he really doesn't get a chance to do much of anything at all. Neither Batman nor Bruce ever are really able to grab hold of this movie. It's a dark, gloomy tale of the bad guys, the Penguin in particular. And where Nicholson's Joker infused the first film with so much energy the Penguin sucks the life out of this film. There's very little to enjoy here. Is it so much to ask to have a little fun in a comic book movie? No fun here, just gloom and doom and a movie which really disappoints.