Of bats, men and sequels....

Rating: 3/10 (24 June 2000)

I can see what Tim Burton was trying to do with "Batman Returns".
In the original, there was darkness enough but also a bit too much of the flip attitude of the TV series for his taste. After all, we're talking about artistic integrity here. Once and for all, he wanted to make his OWN interpretation of the "Batman" mystique, which he did here.
Point of order - this movie is indeed successful in showing how good a craftsman Burton is for dark, gloomy images of despair, misgivings and doom. But, is that the right attitude for a movie about a super hero to strike?
In a gloomy, seemingly refrigerated Gotham City, Batman must battle the evil of not only The Penguin (DeVito) and Catwoman (Pfeiffer) but also of businessman Max Schreck (Walken) who plans to drain all of Gotham's energy for his own power plant, along with a few other twisted deeds he has hidden up his tailor-made sleeves.
BUT, and this is the important part, the first movie had a successful villain in Nicholson's Joker (as if there were any doubt). Here, the villains are seen more as objects of pity (the deformed, pathetic Penguin; the put-upon, mentally abused Catwoman; the power-hungry, grasping and son (Bryniarski)-obsessed Schreck) than of anything inherently evil.

And then there's Batman - as portrayed by Keaton, he feels more like a cypher - an empty suit, if you will - than he was in the first film. He doesn't even give a flicker of the torment he felt in the original. Here, he just broods.
As before, the scenery is beautiful, if more dark. Burton is, first and foremost, an artist and shows his talents in composition and design. But even though the first "Batman" was far more successful, it had less to do with Burton and more to do with the calibre of other talent involved (Nicholson, Basinger, Wuhl).
Devito plays a one-note villain without any nuance or subtlety; Pfeiffer makes a suitably flaky Catwoman and, even though she tries, her character is far too pitiable to be threatening' Walken basically plays his umpteenth baddie but still pales in comparison to similar parts he's played in "True Romance", and "A View to a Kill" (sure, it wasn't very good, but it was still better than THIS!).
This series would have to wait to improve ("Batman Forever"), but as far as sequels go, it at least kept with Burton's vision, even if it didn't keep with the entertainment value.
Three stars for "Batman Returns".
TIDBIT - Reubens and Salinger, who played the parents to DeVito's character, were featured in an earlier Burton effort - "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure". Talk about a token gesture....