None of it makes any sense, and Burton doesn't really mind

Rating: 2/10 (22 November 2019)

As a big Batman fan who liked 1989 Batman and was fresh off watching the wonderful campy show Gotham, Batman Returns seemed like a great watch, with a famous take on Penguin and a dark villain-oriented story. The parts fit together on paper, but on the screen it was nonsensical, with no coherent or interesting characters, a nonexistent plot, and one of the most laughable scripts I've ever seen - for all the wrong reasons.
This movie starts and ends with the characters, so let's dig into them. Penguin is the biggest character in this movie I'd say, and early on I thought he had legitimate potential. While it doesn't make any sense, his backstory is interesting - he was abandoned by his parents, and drifted to the (abandoned?) zoo and grew up in the sewers with penguins. How he got food to survive for 33 years, why he looks 70 years old as a 33 year old, how he acquired things like the rubber ducky or his many umbrellas, why he never went aboveground, or how he survived and learned about the world if he never went aboveground: none of that matters. What matters is that he wanted to learn who his parents were and make Gotham stop taking everything for granted. He makes a decent play in blackmailing Shreck to gain power, and then Shreck gives him the platform to become mayor. This is where it becomes clear that Burton is not interested in logic. Penguin, the grotesque and uncharismatic sewer creature, is somehow beloved by everyone, even after biting a dude's nose off and making two gross sexual comments to women. There's no reason for him to be mayor - he's never really given the chance to be a creative, manipulative planner and is just thrust into the role through citywide pity. Even though he has no coherent plan throughout the movie, I perked up when I heard his scheme at the end to kidnap kids to show Gotham all they took for granted. The plan was literally stealing them and putting them in jail cells on a train riding around town, which was quickly and anticlimactically thwarted by Batman. To his credit, he seems unsurprised his half-baked idea didn't work and says it's time for plan B: blow up the city by attaching rocket launchers to hundreds of penguins and mind-controlling them. Of course! Batman sees this on his special penguin radar and, in one of countless instances of boringly lazy writing, Alfred jams the signal so the penguins return to the zoo. That's the climax? Then Penguin has to come out to the streets in his rubber ducky to really show Gotham who's boss (don't worry about what he was gonna do in the rubber ducky), and Batman drives right into him thanks to the handy penguin radar that also tracks big rubber duckies, sending Penguin into the water below. Aside from being half the age he looked, I liked the way Penguin's look was designed, but his dialogue is poor, he has no real ambition throughout the movie, and his one plan that could've been coherent was comically stupid.
I'll spend less time on Catwoman, since she doesn't even have the promising aspects that Penguin does. She is presented as a nervous and incompetent secretary, but after being shoved out a window goes insane and becomes the Catwoman. No, there's no reason why her near-death made her want to be whatever she became, but don't worry, she actually never has any plans or goals. She'd be happy to kill Shreck, but isn't focused on this during the movie, and gets mad at Batman and Penguin when they fight her, but there isn't a single time when she dresses as Catwoman with any goal or plan of what she wants to do. She simply goes and sees if anyone looks ripe to... intimidate, I guess? I'm really not sure. She also gets shot four times and tases a dude while grabbing an electrical wire until he's fried to a crisp, but of course she doesn't die because she has 9 lives. Her sudden transition from being extremely clumsy and awkward to super athletic and aggressive is not at all believable, and even aside from that is a boring character with literally no ambition or ideas.
Batman is given relatively little screen time, and Keaton is still fine as Batman, but completely lifeless. Gone are any moral dilemmas of taking the law into his own hands or even just creative ways to stop the villains. His penguin/rubber ducky radar, frequency jammer, and being a sick DJ on the Penguin tracks are all he needs.
The things wrong with these three characters embody the many problems the film faces as a whole. There's no thematic material or ideas, none of the characters have real ambition or plans, and the set pieces that are supposed to feel exciting are either rote or laughably unrealistic. For every uninspired Batman punching people scene, we have Penguin being lured into a bizarre underground office for his mayoral campaign by a raw fish, Catwoman eating one of Penguin's birds to show she means business (I guess???), and the hundreds of penguins tossing those goggles on to get ready for the rockets. I'll give the movie credit in the few places it's due: the score was quite good, and the visuals of Gotham were pretty solid, as long as you ignore that they walk on the same street literally the entire movie. People generally seem to regard Batman Returns with respect, and I can't see what element of the movie isn't abysmal - the characters, script, and plot are all bottom notch. That also makes me scared for Batman Forever and Batman and Robin - can they really be worse than this mess? None of the events in Batman Returns make any sense at all, and the only pleasant parts are when you realize how ridiculous the movie has gotten and laugh at the game of one-upsmanship Burton plays with himself in regard to nonsensical plot points. If you want a campy, fun villain-based vision of Gotham, watch the show Gotham. If you want a dark Batman, watch the Nolan trilogy. If you want a well-done Michael Keaton Batman, watch the 1989 Batman. Only turn to Batman Returns if you're truly hankering for a movie with ambitionless and uncreative characters and a plot that has no interest in making sense.