Well done... but undone by too many villains...

Rating: 6/10 (30 July 2017)

"Batman Returns" is by no means a bad movie. In terms of action, set-design, scoring and acting, there's nothing to envy from its predecessor of1989. Yet something was lacking, definitely. Whatever it was, I was so turned off that I'd rather explain why the original was so good instead.
"Batman" had that Gothic atmosphere that fitted the tormented mind of Bruce Wayne, billionaire, vigilante and misfit, and the noir tone of the film fitted a city where organized crime reigned supreme; but had it been just an exercise in style and design, "Batman" would've been poisoned by its own depressing mold, the film worked because it had an antidote, a grinning psychopath played by Jack Nicholson, a Joker who, as far as characterization went, was no joke.
I said in the review of the first film that Nicholson's Joker scared me because of the way he enjoyed killing and made every homicide, an art, something fun actually. What it reveals about the performance doesn't need to be over-analyzed, you could tell Nicholson had fun playing the Joker, and that fun was communicative without making his actions any less impacting. The Joker, played by a deliberately over-the-top Nicholson was a histrionic bastard intoxicated by his own flamboyance and yet making the whole film a real macabre dance between organized crime and the Dark Knight.
Keaton wasn't too present in the picture but his investigation on the Joker's action and the interludes with Kim Basinger were actually the moments we could catch our breath between two Joker's scenes. Now, to put it simply, Keaton isn't any more present in "Batman Returns", which makes the title a bit misleading, he's even a rather tertiary character, but the villains in the film could have made his absence unnoticeable except that they were as much in need of a psychotherapy as Bruce Wayne himself. The film got too psychological and dark for its own good.
There is basically one villain too many, and I guess that is Max Shreck, Christopher Walken as the evil businessman who wants to control Gotham City through electric power. He doesn't have many shining moments, except for throwing his secretary Serena Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer) out of the window once she unmasked her evil project, he does look good in an odd sexy way, but he's never as impacting a presence as Danny De Vito playing the Penguin or Pfeiffer as Catwoman, which is the height of irony since he's the actor most used to play creepy guys. You would think De Vito and Pfeiffer would spice up the film a little and "have fun" like good old Jack, but they're actually victim of the plot's intricacy.
Indeed, "Batman Returns" feels more like an assemblage of many subplots that were certainly mouth-watering on the paper: Schrek's s plans, the penguin's quest to find his parents echoing Wayne's own trauma (he was abandoned an orphan child and was raised by penguins, living in the sewers for three decades), Serena Kyle seeking revenge against Shreck and criminals of male persuasion. There's also something interesting in the ambiguity governing the so-called villains, the Penguin wants to be loved by Gotham City community, Catwoman is a vigilante but her actions are often antagonistic to Batman, not to mention the romance growing in subtext.
To make things even more complicated, you have Christmas in the backdrop, the City undergoes many assaults from the Red Circus Triangle, and many love or hate triangles from one character to another make the plot quickly derail. The original "Batman" had one villain, not the subtlest plot but that was enough, by trying to make many antagonists and make them as three-dimensional as possible, the film went in too many directions, creating a Rubik-cube of a plot, without the colors to make the final result look good.
Indeed, each of these stories, was depressing as hell, there was something fun in Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman but like the Penguin, like Bruce Wayne, they were characters turned to the past, to the initial struggles of their human counterpart while the Joker was from any trauma. The only villain with a focus on the future was Schreck but he could only be underused, and so was Batman.
In the end, you have a Christmas movie whose action sequence provided nothing new once you enjoyed the original but whose tone is so dark and depressing you might enjoy the film for the actors, the atmosphere, but you wouldn't think of watching it again.