Neither fish nor...

Rating: 5/10 (15 February 2011)

I really enjoyed Tim Burton's first tip at Batman and felt he'd found a good actor for the lead, Michael Keaton as well of course as a highly individual and laudably retro- representation of the dark and monolithic Gotham City, making it almost a character in itself and thus easy to accept the grotesque and deranged characters which emerge from the gloom to take on the blacker-than-black hero. Here though, I felt that too much was not enough as we get two villains for the price of one, as The Penguin and Catwoman make their bows in Batman's rogues gallery meaning we get two origin stories, a changing shift of perspective and of course two big (or is that one?) deaths at the end. I can't fault the acting - as I said earlier, I like Keaton's calm demeanour as Bruce Wayne which turns to cold steel when he changes to his alter-ego, while Danny Devito, if never looking like my image of the comic-book Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer (who certainly does) obviously have fun wearing the clothes and hamming it up in the dark. Christopher Walken also gets in on the act as an un-costumed mega-rich do-badder who casually throws a pre-feline Selina Kyle out of a high-storey building amongst many other sins.
Overall though, I felt the narrative was over-cluttered and that a shorter film concentrating on just one enemy would have made for a less demanding watch. For all that the film's special effects are terrific, with lots of pyrotechnics to the fore while I also detected more humour on board to help lighten the journey somewhat. Burton is unquestionably a very talented director with an eye for a memorable image of which there are several here but this time I think he overcooked the feast.
On his next outing both director and star were gone although the idea of paired villains wasn't but by then the element of realism was starting to crumble, to the detriment of the drama on the screen. It would take Christopher Nolan to go back to Burton's dark vision, obviously via Frank Miller to produce a Batman for the 21st Century.