Tim Burton can't help himself

Rating: 3/10 (23 November 2009)

The problem with Tim Burton is that he lives in his own little universe where the rest of us wouldn't even want to visit.
It's not that the man hasn't done some good films. "Beetlejuice", "Ed Wood" and even the first "Batman" film were actually all pretty decent outings. It's when he's left on his own to indulge his inner weirdo that we get some pretty funky results.
All Burton/Schumacher Batman films can be divided into a checklist. "How I became a Supervillian" Check. "Batman goes into elaborate costume change sequence" Check. "Supervillian shoots his own minion" Check. "Big overdrawn battle with bad buy at end." Check.
Danny Devito seemed like a good choice to play the Penguin because of the similar body types. (Short, pudgy.) But the characters are completely different. The Penguin was a sophisticated, Gentleman bandit. Devito has made his career playing, rude, crude obnoxious characters. Loading him down in a ton of makeup didn't help.
Michelle Pfeiffer might have been the stuff of a hundred lesbian fantasies until Haley Berre did the same role some time later, but as a character, she was kind of shallow.
And replacing the kind of grim comic book Gotham of the first movie with the weird fantasy of this one further disconnected it...