"What do you say we take off our costumes?"

Rating: 7/10 (22 March 2014)

A couple decades ago when this film came out, I thought the Batman series of films was generally OK. Watching them today I'm left in complete disbelief over how over the top and silly the characters and stories are. DeVito does a good job in portraying the hideous villain in this one, but gosh, the Penguin is absolutely disgusting. Those close-ups of him eating raw fish and oozing blood out of his mouth are gag inducing, making it utterly unbelievable that this was a serious contender for mayor of Gotham City. What were they thinking?
Say, do you know there was a real person named Max Schreck? He was a German silent film actor who portrayed the very first movie vampire in 1922's "Nosferatu", one of my favorite classics. So I wonder if Christopher Walken's character in the picture was inspired by the real deal. Interestingly, the word 'schreck' is German for terror, so there may be something to it.
As a comic book Batman fan, I can't get too worked up over this picture. Michael Keaton is not my idea of a suitable Bruce Wayne OR Batman actor, and the design of the bat-suit for the movies is too bulky and gawky for me. Seeing a whole closet full of them here was a bit of a surprise, not to mention the accessories. I guess I just never thought about it before; all that high flying action probably causes some damage every now and then.
One thing the movie managed to remind me of today is just how long global warming hysteria has been around. An entire new generation has now been propagandized to believe that Man has something to do with impacting the weather. The Penguin's off the cuff remark to 'stop global warming and start global cooling' was almost up to speed in 1992; the world's mean temperature hasn't changed one bit in the last seventeen years as I write this.
With a quick nod to Michelle Pfeiffer as a sexy Selina Kyle/Catwoman, that's about as much faint praise I can give the film, and even there I have to hold back. The picture's dialog is filled with double entendres and sexual references, and to my thinking, brings down it's value as family entertainment. I'd rather think of my super-heroes as being more traditional and conservative. But I'll hand it to Max Schreck, even as a greedy capitalist, he fully realized that an economy with one percent growth like we have today simply sucks.