Tim Burton's follow-up to his tremendously successful Batman (1989) has the same look and feel but just doesn't achieve the same level of adventure and sheer quality.

Rating: 6/10 (18 January 2003)

In comic book films like the Batman movies, the thing that has to be there, that is at least as important as having a title character that the audience will love to love, is to have a good bad guy, and that means someone that is wonderfully hate-able and has the power to make us fear him or her. The bad guy has to be intimidating, even for us as member's of the audience. Jack Nicholson was able to add his cynical charm to the Joker to make us like him, but just enough to allow us to hate him at the same time, maybe even as a result. His parade through the crowded streets of Gotham City where he gleefully gassed thousands and thousands of people was more than enough to illustrate the extent of his madness and his hatred for mankind in general, but Danny DeVito's Penguin is just not a scary character, no matter which way you look at him.
The biggest problem here is that the Penguin teams up with a corrupt businessman (Max Shrek, played brilliantly by Christopher Walken), and even goes so far to run for Mayor of Gotham City. These are not the kinds of things that comic book villains do, and he came off as little more than a hideously ugly candidate for mayor with plans to make himself massively rich off the poor suckers of Gotham. DeVito is one of our few actors who is able to consistently play shady characters who are flawlessly convincing and yet strangely likable, and his talent is completely devoured here in the enormity of the prosthetics that he is forced to endure for this role, which does not do him justice as an actor in any way.
Christopher Walken is also an actor who is almost incapable of filling a role without making it hugely entertaining, and he is completely wasted and misused here. Not only is his enormous charisma swallowed up by his goofy mad scientist wig the way DeVito's is by his repulsive costume, but he plays the role of a corrupt businessman that he just doesn't fit in. Like Denzel Washington in Training Day, Walken does not work well here because he is forced to play a character that he is simply too likable to pull off. He does as well as can be expected, and his screen presence was more than welcomed anytime he was onscreen, but the role just doesn't fit him.
I love the role that Walken plays, by the way. I am not sure whether this is a throwback to the earlier actor (although it almost seems like it's just too much of a coincidence not to be), but of course you remember Max Shrek as the mysterious actor who played the vampire in the 1922 horror film, Nosferatu. I won't go into too much detail here, but this is one of the most fascinating mystery biographies in movie history, so much so that an entire film was made about this actor only a few years ago, The Shadow of the Vampire, which I highly recommend.
Michael Keaton is back again, thankfully, to play the part of the caped crusader (unfortunately for the last time, since they HAD to keep making Batman sequels), filling the role with charm and personality, and Michael Gough is also back perfecting as Alfred and returning as one of the only actors to have been in all four (thus far) Batman films. Michael Keaton and Michael Gough work so well in their roles that it's amazing the series was even able to survive (although whether or not it survived or just became a dead horse will vary, depending on who you ask) when Michael Keaton stopped taking on the role of Batman.
I remember when I was in high school I was amazed at how sexy Michelle Pfeiffer looks in that hot little latex Catwoman outfit, but watching now that I'm a senior in college, she just doesn't have the same effect. Instead of being captivated by her incredibly sexy body, the first thing I noticed was her slutty eye-shadow and glowingly bright red lipstick (which is so overpowering in an otherwise almost colorless movie that it almost seems to dance around the screen by itself like the grin of the Cheshire Cat), I was instead amazed at how obvious it is that the Catwoman is meant to have this loose sexual appeal, which I like to think fades drastically as maturity increases. Pfeiffer was able to fulfill this at the time, but I think that she as an actor has matured and taken on more respectable roles since, so that looking back it's almost like looking at some foolish thing you might have done in your own younger days.
Batman Returns is entertaining in that it is such a visible spectacle and it is so interesting to watch the new characters, but overall it is a disappointment because it just doesn't have the same substance of the original. There are interesting new characters, but they are little more than strange creations than creatures in themselves, things to be looked at rather than entertained by, leaving this installment in the Batman series as a skeleton of what it could have and should have been. Fans of the old comics are sure to be put off by things like this, as are die-hard fans of the original films, but the kids, I'm sure, are going to love it.