Never bring a cat in front of a bat

Rating: 9/10 (2 October 2015)

Thirty three years later Batman is still the same age and Alfred Pennyworth has not caught one single wrinkle more. They are beyond time. That's of course the very first axiom of a comic strip, hence of any comic strip super hero (look at Tintin for one). They do not age. Around them though people are getting old of course, but since very few are the same from one film to the next it does not matter. And of course Batman's paramour of the first film has disappeared from the picture, or should I say pictures?
Then the plot has to be really renewed indeed. Tim Burton has decided to make it a lot more complex and complicated. Instead of one good one, Batman, and one bad one, here the Penguin, he gets two more, both on the evil side, though one is slightly insecure as for her profile between good and evil. Catwoman is a funny addition here because she is a super hero who is supposed to enhance Batman more than achieve anything. She is a simple secretary that her boss decides one day to kill by pushing her through a window. But she survives. There are miracles like that in life. And she becomes Catwoman out of her total insanity. Her only objective is to be a nuisance but on any side available though at the last minute she rejects Batman because it might be too confusing since Batman proposes to get into a love affair but under his real identity of Bruce Wayne. True enough a cat and a bat together in the same bed does not sound serious.
The second addition, and frankly only evil, is the industrialist Shreck who wants to build a power station that would produce a lot more than necessary. But the real problem his secretary, the future Catwoman, discovered is that the factory will be an environmental and ecological catastrophe (3that will be my legacy" says Mr. Shreck, showing how vain industrialists can and may be.). The film is very skimpy on this problem and Bruce Wayne, at the end, only tells him to stop speaking because anyway he is going to prison as soon as the film is finished.
The main character against Batman is the Penguin, a melodramatic orphan (self orphaned probably), a pathetic story teller, a miserable violent and criminal ambitious nincompoop, a lackluster entertainer who is just the addition of poop to nin, nothing, though it means "not of sound mind" in Latin. He lives with a whole flock of penguins in an Arctic kingdom of some sort in the sewers and he is surrounded by a band of social cases who are jugglers, acrobats, whizz kids, and plain clowns and criminals who are just there to entertain the crowd before shooting them down like useless dogs. Though it is a clichÃ© to say that a social case or a serial killer is the result of the bad education given to a child by his parents, it is done effectively to make us believe that the poor chap has become a criminal by choice vastly teleguided by what society made him suffer, bear and endure, in this case because he has a certain physical malformation that becomes his total fixation. His orientation and fixation then is a bird that does not fly and eats salmon. I guess that would easily be considered by some as the eleventh gender orientation, because as for gender he is nothing but a bird of no feather at all.
The action is packed, the violence is brutal, which is expected, and the end is sadly unromantic, which is saluted by the audience as a good thing because if a cat meets a bat I do not know what kind of a chat they could have under their hats, and one cannot pat the other but scratch and when the other sat on the first one she felt like a rebellious mat. And imagine a rat in that couple. The two would be fighting to have a good bite into it.
An entertaining film with some obnoxious situations for obnoxious people, like the mayor of Gotham, or Mr. Shreck. You should get some kicks out of these human animal hybrids.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU