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Batman (1989): Burton's phenomenally successful first crack at Batman might make you nostalgic, however briefly, for the days that a strange, often chilly, visually stunning movie could attract a mass audience purely for its intensely visual take on a classic character. Today, a summer movie's success or failure in reaching certain financial benchmarks is held up as incontrovertible proof of audience affection levels (or lack thereof), and, as such, even some perfectly decent superhero movies feel engineered for maximum crowd-pleasing. Whereas you can watch Burton's
Batman and wonder: what, if anything, was crowd-pleasing about this movie? Indeed, my one-man crowd who loves both Burton and Batman is not particularly pleased by it, even when it stuns me. Michael Keaton plays Bruce Wayne as something of an oddball distraction, a quiet sidebar to his emerging vigilante work, and his underplaying works well against Jack Nicholson's signature hamming. There's an unfortunate tendency to view similar movies in binary upgrade/downgrade terms, so I should stress that Nicholson's Joker doesn't just fall short in comparison to Heath Ledger; he falls short as a character who isn't more or less Jack Doing Jack. As in
The Shining, Nicholson seems pretty much crazy from the jump, so his transformation into a somewhat more ostentatious crazy person lacks real horror, despite some vividly horrific touches. Batman also has a lady problem: Kim Basinger's listless Vicki Vale feels like an awkward date that never ends, and she comes with bonus unfunny Robert Wuhl as her Guy Friday. For all of the darkness and perversity of Burton's film, his personality doesn't always pop through; just as Batman's duality insolates him from other characters, Burton's conception of the character feels stranded inside a bigger, more unwieldy picture.
Grade: B-
