Last year, Avengers: Endgame, the twenty second entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, earned $2.798 billion worldwide and thus becoming the most successful film of all time (unadjusted for inflation; with inflation, Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara beats Avengers’ Scarlett Johansson with a fistful of cotton). Toss in several other billion dollar grossers and Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-winning turn in Joker, and 2019 may well represent the cultural and commercial apotheosis of the superhero/comic book movie.
My two cents: the genre peaked from 1989–1992 with the five film punch of Batman (1989), Dick Tracy (1990), Darkman (1990), The Rocketeer (1991), and Batman Returns (1992).
I’m not suggesting these five films mark the genre’s cultural or commercial peak—though some were very successful—nor its critical peak—although again some were well received critically. Nor do they mark its imaginative pinnacle, nor its apex of ambition: the scale and world-building of, say, 2019’s Aquaman, with the aid of twenty-five plus years of advanced visual effects wizardry, leaves these five films out to dry (pun intended). Where recent comic book films paint on a cosmic canvas, this quintet is distinctly earthbound, and arguably shares more DNA with the Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson tough guy movies of the preceding era. Moreover, they’re very white and extremely masculine films, both in front of, and behind, the camera — with little of the diversity on display in recent comic book films like Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, or Birds of Prey.
But as self-contained films untethered to and unburdened by larger cinematic universes — and as (mostly) auteur-driven works not beholden to any in-house style — I’d argue these five films are more interesting, more stylish, and more playful than the bulk of the superhero features that followed in their wake. They also represent a last hurrah for rendering super-heroics onscreen largely sans digital effects; later in the decade, computer-generated effects would saturate comic book films like The Mask, Spawn and Blade. The fact these films wrangle their heroics onto celluloid with models and matte paintings and without the luxuries of CGI makes their accomplishments more impressive. These five films are flawed but special and speak to the elasticity of the superhero movie even in its infancy. They are very different beasts to the comic book film as it exists today; they look, feel, move, and sound different in a genre where time isn’t always kind. In some respects they’ve aged like fine wine, in others they’ve dated poorly. And apart from Batman, awareness of their pioneering status has dimmed with the passage of time. This article offers up some context, wipes away some dirt, shines some appreciative light upon, and makes a case for the class of 1989–1992.
In a recent piece here on The Curb I cited Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and John Landis as directors who occupied primetime space in my youthful viewing. To this list I’d add Tim Burton, who between Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and Batman Returns owned a few years of my childhood. With Batman, the filmmaker wrote a blank cheque for the rest of his career, but where its sequel is unfiltered Burton, Batman sees him working within studio imperatives.
The film pits Batman/Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) against crime kingpin Jack Napier/The Joker (Jack Nicholson), and tasks the Dark Knight with thwarting the Clown Prince of Crime’s nefarious intentions for both Gotham City and his love interest Vicky Vale (Kim Basinger). The top-billed, handsomely-paid Nicholson plays to the rafters in his outré turn, kicking off a bizarre tradition of the Joker as the Hamlet of postmodern blockbuster cinema; an enigmatic role essayed by former Oscar winners (Nicholson, Jared Leto) or gifting actors their winning shot at Oscar gold (Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix). Meanwhile the unconventional, puffy-haired, craggy-faced, pointy-lipped Keaton broke the typecasting mould for both comedy and action stars, playing Wayne as a broken space cadet and Batman with steely yet soft-spoken gravitas, conceding to but ultimately owning like a boss the limitations of a largely immobile costume.
At the time of its release, the spin on Batman hyped it as the ultimate take on the Dark Knight onscreen: a mega-budget, serious treatment of the material in contrast to the (still-great) campy Adam West-starring TV series of the 1960s. With the gift of hindsight, there’s no ultimate take on such malleable material, with every version having its rightful place in the canon. Further, looking back there’s something rather chintzy and goofy about Burton’s Batman despite its grandiose aspirations. Its larger than life status was partly a triumph of marketing and corporate packaging, from the cultural ubiquity of the Bat logo, to the Prince soundtrack, to its Nicholson casting coup which harnessed his superstar status in much the same way Superman had harnessed Marlon Brando’s cachet a decade earlier. The film supporting this massive hype machine is somewhat more modest in its ambitions, and though all the dollars from its generous budget are visibly onscreen in the large sets and costumes, it feels rather quaint thirty years later, and comparatively claustrophobic and stage-bound.
History has borne out that Burton is a great visual stylist (albeit with a now familiar bag of tricks and an increasing dependence on CGI), but not exactly a teller of rounded and cohesive stories. Batman exemplifies this: it’s a film of great moments, scored to a bombastic earworm of a theme by Danny Elfman. Moments like this, and this, and this, and this, and many more still pop thirty plus years later. Burton pulls from his own personal pop culture bank in building atmospherics—there’s a touch of Universal Monsters, a smidgen of Hammer, a whopping dollop of German Expressionism—and as a former animator has a knack for maximising the expressiveness of a scene by framing, timing, and holding a shot long enough so it imprints on the viewer. Such an approach—privileging an arresting image or scene over the integrity of the whole—is not inconsistent with the late 80s Hollywood aesthetic: Tony Scott’s Top Gun is chockfull of stunning shots of jets in flight, but I’m unsure they ever stitch together in a geographically sound way. Batman’s colour scheme—contrasting Batman and Gotham’s blacks, greys and browns with the Joker’s electric purples and greens—creates arresting visuals. Lest I be an auteurist fanboy, credit’s also due to director of photography Roger Pratt, editor Roger Lovejoy, production designer Anton Furst, and costume designer Bob Ringwood, amongst others.
There’s a case to be made that the larger than life status of Batman outweighs the rickety frame of the film supporting it, and that the film coasts on its iconic moments to some degree. But those moments and images remain striking and indelible and play remarkably well thirty years later. Time will tell if any of the signature moments from comic book films of the last decade have similar staying power; I certainly can’t think of any from the noughties which have shown similar stamina.
Batman established a comic book movie template: pulpy retro heroics, highly stylised filmmaking, and a bombastic Danny Elfman score. The Rocketeer adopted a more classical filmmaking style and nixed the Elfman score, but delivered pulpy retro heroics in spades, whilst Batman Returns parted ways with the retro pulp angle but cranked everything else up to eleven. Dick Tracy and Darkman, the first releases in Batman’s wake, hit all three notes. There’s always some risk in assigning influence amongst films released within a year of each other, especially when one of those films is directed by the exacting and meticulous Warren Beatty, and indeed Beatty had toyed with adapting Chester Gould’s beloved Dick Tracy strips since the mid-1970s. However, the film is cut from very similar cloth to Batman, with a major star hamming it up as the villain (Al Pacino here subbing for Nicholson), a major pop star on the soundtrack (Madonna here subbing for Prince), and logo art that Disney tried (but failed) to make as ubiquitous as the Bat symbol ahead of the film’s release. Additionally there was plentiful merchandising on the side.
Beatty directed, produced, and stars in Dick Tracy as the titular yellow-coated crime-fighter, tasked with taking down mobster Big Boy Caprice (an Oscar-nominated Pacino) and choosing between the alluring Breathless Mahoney (Madonna) and the good-natured Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly). Whereas Burton clearly gravitated to Batman/Bruce Wayne as a likeminded warped outsider, Beatty, like Tracy, was approaching his own fifty-something romantic crossroads, and the following year would mirror Tracy in choosing between continuing his womanising ways or settling down with Bugsy co-star Annette Bening. He chose the latter. He would also have four children with Bening, mirroring Tracy’s adoption of a young ward (a spirited Charlie Korsmo). Batman, despite famously having a young ward in print and other media, would not meet his onscreen Robin until Joel Schumacher’s 1995 film Batman Forever.
Where the modern slate of superhero films is very liberal, there’s a slightly right-wing bent to the 1989–1992 quintet. Keaton evokes Clint Eastwood’s authoritarian ‘Dirty’ Harry Calahan with his cool menacing whisper, Darkman pursues rough vengeance against those who wronged him in a Charles Bronson/Death Wish vein, and Tracy is authorised by the law to shoot holes into gangsters. It is novel seeing Beatty in action hero mode for the only real time in his career—though his most iconic role, Clyde Barrow (in Arthur Penn’s 1967 Oscar winning Bonnie and Clyde), saw him brandishing a gun on the opposite side of the law. There’s something inherently goofy about Beatty, with his swollen dome and vacant stare and just-shy-of-garbled delivery. He was, and remains, a sex symbol – but at times feels like a slightly exaggerated and ever-so-slightly misshapen Mad Magazine version of a sex symbol. It’s served him well in his career, enabling him to sneak up on and confound the expectations of critics and detractors, and made him an amiable avatar to help the hefty exposition and political jargon of Reds and the tough truth-bombs of Bulworth go down with audiences. But it also makes him as unlikely a decisive, veiny action hero as Keaton, and it is fun watching him in this anomalous role.
The fact this comic book film was Beatty’s directorial follow-up to the sprawling, Oscar-winning, three hour plus Reds—and that his only other starring role in the decade between was in Elaine May’s Ishtar; a Hope & Crosby-esque team-up with Dustin Hoffman that was a notorious flop—says a lot about Beatty’s idiosyncratic instincts. Lest Dick Tracy be dismissed as a grab for commerce or a mere trifle, it’s worth noting Beatty brought with him a bevy of creative heavy hitters, including Vittorio Storaro, the director of photography for Reds, Apocalypse Now,and The Last Emperor; Richard Sylbert, the production designer of Reds, Shampoo, and Chinatown; and Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim, to name a few. Like Richard Hammond, another mad entrepreneur of the 1990s with deep pockets, Beatty spared no expense on his theme park ride of a film.
Where Beatty and company really go for broke is the film’s use of colour. The Joker is Batman’s main source of onscreen colour; in contrast, nearly every frame of Dick Tracy is conspicuously colourful. Sets and costumes are painted in bright primary shades, and costumes are similarly loud. This aesthetic choice pays homage to Chester Gould’s source material, but also gifts the film’s more emotional moments a melodramatic, Lichtenstein-esque pop art vibe. This gives Dick Tracy a layer of artifice as thick as the make-up on characters such as Pacino’s Big Boy, William Forsythe’s Flattop, and R.G. Armstrong’s Pruneface. Where Batman attempted to simulate the real-world despite being very stage-bound, Dick Tracy wholeheartedly embraced its stage-bound status with actors-playing-dress-up quality, and in doing so extends the tradition of Depression-era Warner Bros gangster films shot on the studio’s stagey backlots into the comic book movie realm.
Before there were remakes, before there were reboots, before there were prequels, there were rip-offs. And Darkman is a glorious rip-off, with director Sam Raimi and his collaborators pillaging not only Batman and The Shadow (which the filmmaker attempted but failed to get his hands on) but also The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the Universal Monster movies. In a nice bit of synergy, Universal produced the film.
Like the very best rip-offs, Darkman creates something new and delightful from its pop culture bricolage. When mobsters blow up the laboratory of brilliant scientist Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson), leaving him hideously disfigured, he adopts the bandage-clad mantle of Darkman to take revenge. Physically heavy-duty and immune to pain, Westlake uses synthetic skin to adopt various disguises and work his way through the villain food chain up to chief bad Robert Durant (Larry Drake) and CEO bad Louis Strack (Colin Friels), whilst attempting to win back his love interest Julie (Frances McDormand).
Raimi links three eras of superhero cinema: in the 1990s he directed Darkman, in the 2000s he helmed three Spider-Man movies, and he’s recently hitched his wagon to the MCU with a sequel to Doctor Strange. But Darkman is Raimi’s own character, which makes the film unique in this 1989–1992 batch—and to some degree the genre overall—as a wholly original (if derivative) screen creation. Like Burton, Raimi was regarded as an oddball cult director—best known for the schlocky Evil Dead films—but was lauded for his slapstick sensibility and D.I.Y. inventiveness: his early films showcase a show-offy, flamboyant visual style that calls attention to certain special effects and camera moves (whip pans, Dutch tilts, long tracking shots with the camera mounted to a motorcycle, etc.).
Darkman not only gave Raimi his first big budget (albeit modest compared to Batman and Dick Tracy), but also his strongest cast to date. Though Bruce Campbell’s no chopped liver, Neeson and McDormand occupy another tier. Neeson had spent a decade playing rugged period decor in films like Excalibur, The Bounty and The Mission, and a few years later would be the star of prestige films like Schindler’s List, Rob Roy and Michael Collins. Darkman was his first contemporary action lead, a decade and a half before he made ‘dad action’ movies his bread and butter, but where he’s stoic and level-headed in Taken and its ilk, he plays the deranged Westlake with a nice line of tortured, melodramatic camp. McDormand was respected if not widely-known for her work in Blood Simple and Mississippi Burning, with Oscar-winning turns in Fargo and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri in her future. There’s little in Darkman that taxes the overqualified actress, and she sadly becomes a ‘bound & gagged’ damsel for much of the final act. That said, McDormand has wonderful chemistry with Neeson and provides a good sparring partner for Friels’ scheming executive. Friels plays Strack as a seductive, charismatic American Machiavelli, which almost works if you squint and forget everything you know about Colin Friels and his 40 years onscreen as a naturalistic Australian everyman.
Where Raimi spent much of the late 1990s and subsequent decades burying his abovementioned visual style in service of mainstream material, the appeal of Raimi’s early work was his self-aware, braggadocious approach. That approach is on display in Darkman, elevating what could be standard dialogue scenes and papering over financial constraints in the film’s action sequences. Darkman’s big set pieces are somewhat more sparsely distributed than other action movies of the era, but the film goes for broke in its third act, with successive climactic scenes in Darkman’s warehouse lair, in a helicopter chase above the city, and atop a skyscraper under construction. This segment from the helicopter pursuit exemplifies the playfulness and almost handmade quality of Darkman’s action:
I share the above with some reticence. On a tiny screen, viewed out of context, it looks cheap and ropey. But on a bigger screen, watched in context, it’s a fun and energetic romp bolstered by Elfman’s madcap scoring and Raimi and company’s wildly mixed bag of tricks: including POV shots, hand-held camerawork, tracking shots mounted to vehicles, rear projection, and so on. It’s filmmaking as patchwork quilt, with shots varying in quality, but it clicks at multiple levels: it works (or 95% works) to deliver the screen story, it works for giggles by not hiding the seams but embracing them as knowing artifice, and it works for connoisseurs of low-budget craftsmanship. To that end, while Darkman is ostensibly more real-world in its setting and surrounds than Batman or Dick Tracy, it’s also more self-consciously artificial in its construction.
Darkman remains the least known of these five films, to the extent that this scene would be blatantly copied by Mission: Impossible 2 in this scene a decade later. But the film deserves a place at the table. Its theatricality differentiates it from the rest of the class of 1989–1992, but also exemplifies the stylishness of this quintet that is largely missing from the genre today. Recall that Edgar Wright parted ways with Ant-Man because there was limited scope for him to impose his authorial signature within the constraints of the MCU’s in-house style. In contrast, Batman is visually expressive and showcases its director’s animation instincts; Dick Tracy makes bold design choices and owns them; and Darkman offers up look-at-me, virtuoso-on-a-skint-budget filmmaking. All three films are artistically rich and aesthetically playful—at the nuts and bolts level of angles, shots, framing, movement, lighting, cutting—and each does its own thing in a way that contemporary popular Marvel films simply do not.
Like Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer is polished Disney retro pulp product (albeit adapted from more recent source material by Dave Stevens). Unlike Dick Tracy, it wasn’t a hit: it made Darkman money[1] when it should have made Dick Tracy money, given it cost Dick Tracy money. Its underperformance saw the studio shy away from the genre that today, between the MCU and The Incredibles films, is one of its most lucrative earners.
Set in the late 1930s, The Rocketeer centres on hotshot young pilot Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell), who happens upon a mysterious rocket pack. He becomes The Rocketeer, a life choice that sees him fall afoul of mobsters (led by Paul Sorvino), Nazis (led by Timothy Dalton as Neville Sinclair, an swashbuckling Hollywood star cum Nazi spy) and G-Men pursuing the rocket and endangers the lives of Cliff’s loved ones, including mentor Peevy (Alan Arkin) and girlfriend Jenny (Jennifer Connelly) – all of the action occurring over around 72 hours.
Cliff is the only hero in the 1989–1992 quintet who undergoes an archetypal hero’s journey in the tradition outlined by Joseph (no relation to Billy) Campbell; including a call to adventure, supernatural (here technological) aid, transformation, and so on. In contrast, Batman and Dick Tracy are already established, fully-formed adult heroes operating on their beat, much like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Darkman, meanwhile, offers a somewhat parodic, anti-heroic reversal of the hero’s journey. To the extent these characters have arcs, those arcs are intertwined with accepting or rejecting domesticity—Bruce Wayne gets a girlfriend (who he loses by the time Batman Returns rolls around), Tracy finally proposes to Tess and adopts a kid, and Darkman opts to be a loner—or getting revenge—Bruce Wayne kills the man who murdered his parents, while Darkman annihilates those who disfigured him and destroyed his work.
This is not to suggest that The Rocketeer offers richer or more varied characterisation than its 1989–1992 brethren—indeed, Secord’s arc also partially involves becoming a better boyfriend—but it does show that where those other films were more indebted to the police and vigilante action movies of the 1980s, The Rocketeer aspires towards more old school fantasy adventure, and thus has more in common with the superhero movie as we know it today. It also has stakes befitting a superhero movie: thwarting Nazis bent on world domination, a significant threat upgrade from gangsters bent on crime dominion.
When we speak of directors, the label of ‘auteur’ carries cachet and currency. Burton, Beatty, and Raimi are all considered auteurs, while The Rocketeer director Joe Johnston is a filmmaker who might affectionately or disparagingly be called a ‘journeyman’. It’s not an especially sexy label, but there’s a place for journeyman directors ala Johnston and Roger Donaldson and Peter Hyams: filmmakers who can switch genres and tones and deliver satisfying, functional meat and potato entertainment. Johnston has helmed some fun films (Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Jumanji, Jurassic Park III) and like Raimi has straddled more than one era of comic book movies, helming 2011’s Captain America, another World War II-era superhero adventure film. I’d say The Rocketeer and Captain America tie as Johnston’s best films but would give the edge to The Rocketeer on several levels, including its colourful supporting characters and casting. Captain America’s Hugo Weaving, Hayley Atwell, Stanley Tucci and Dominic Cooper are nothing to sniff at, but in their equivalent roles Timothy Dalton is tremendous fun as the Nazi agent posing as Hollywood matinee idol (a role riffing on salacious and bogus rumours about Errol Flynn), Jennifer Connelly is luminous as Jenny, Alan Arkin is droll and endearing in this signature manner, and Terry O’Quinn as Howard Hughes is gravy atop the hearty dish. However, while Secord gets an arc of sorts, the character is ultimately a fairly generic, bland cut of meat, meaning Billy Campbell’s likeable work cannot quite compete with Chris Evans’ pitch perfect, heart-on-sleeve sincere performance in Captain America.
The Rocketeer isn’t as bold in its aesthetic or storytelling choices as its 1989–1992 peers, but its classical old-school vibe conversely gives it an evergreen quality. And in an era where misshapen superhero product—I’m looking at you Fantastic Four, Suicide Squad, Justice League, X-Men: Dark Phoenix—still manages to emerge from the factory hideously overpriced, fundamentally broken, and neither fish nor fowl, The Rocketeer is tribute to rounded, functional filmmaking under the steadiest of hands.
In today’s superhero movie climate, by virtue of shared universes, nearly everything is a prequel or sequel. Batman Returns is the only sequel in the class of 1989–1992 (further Bat films would follow later in the decade, as would two lousy Neeson-less and Raimi-less direct to video Darkman sequels). Billed as an epic showdown between The Bat, The Cat, and The Penguin, the real villain of Batman Returns—conspicuously absent from the trailer above and other advertising—is wealthy businessman Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), who propels the grotesque, sewer-dwelling orphan-turned-circus-attraction-turned-gang lord Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin (Danny DeVito) into the spotlight and mayoral candidacy, and attempts to murder his inquisitive secretary Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), spawning the avenging Catwoman.
Where Batman’s art deco set design and costuming evoke a bygone era in the vein of Donner’s Superman, Dick Tracy and The Rocketeer are definitively set in the 1930s, and Darkman homages the Universal Monster movies of that very decade, within five minutes Batman Returns sends viewers via tracking shot to the top of a sleek modern skyscraper, thrusting viewers into the modern day and unshackling Batman Returns from the pulp baggage of the class of 1989–1992. Atop the skyscraper is an enormous rotating cat head, the logo of Shreck’s company. Shreck is named after Max Shreck, the star of Nosferatu. This has no bearing on Shreck’s characterisation or choice of logo, although does hark back to Burton’s keen interest in German expressionism. His secretary Selina Kyle is a timid cat lady who becomes Catwoman. Shreck’s corporate logo and Kyle’s nomenclature are also unrelated.
It’s important to realise that Batman Returns works best if you don’t care about such things. Indeed, a better title could be Batman Returns, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bat. However, there’s another important thing to know – returning director Tim Burton seemingly neither worries about nor loves the Bat. Batman fares poorly in fights with Catwoman, shows up late twice to thwart the Penguin’s marauding gang, fails to save Gotham City’s Ice Princess (Cristi Conaway) from a fateful plummet, gets his Batmobile hijacked, and is an infrequent screen presence in his own movie. In Batman, his elusiveness kept the character mysterious and enigmatic; here, Batman/Bruce Wayne becomes a minor character in his own sequel, with Burton gravitating more towards his colourful and freakish rogue’s gallery comprising Shreck, the Penguin and Catwoman. There’s a school of thought that the antagonists all represent facets of Batman’s personality—the wealthy businessman, the orphan freak, the costumed crime-fighter/avenger—and another that Batman, Catwoman and the Penguin are all survivors of and present disparate responses to trauma, be they vigilantism and civic duty (Batman) or revenge against an enemy (Catwoman) or the whole wide world (Penguin). But these lively interpretations feel projected upon rather than emerging from the film, and are not really supported by the rather un-sturdy frame of Daniel Waters’ script, which has some delightful lines and venomous quips but also filler dialogue like this scene:
Batman: You’re not the mayor.
Penguin: Things change.
Batman: What do you want?
Penguin: Ah, the direct approach. I admire than in a man in a mask. You don’t really think you’ll win do you?
Batman: Things change.
What exactly changes? Does Batman think he’ll win, but might change his mind? Does he not think he’ll win, despite winning against the Joker in his last screen adventure, but may start to think he’ll win? I suspect the on-set musings while shooting this scene went something like this:
Keaton to DeVito: I don’t really get what this line means, but I know when Tim pulls it all together, it’s gonna sing.
Burton to self: How many skull necklaces will I wear today?
Where the millennial Nolan Batman films are literal-minded and utilitarian, Batman Returns operates on a fairy tale logic, and is conspicuously uninterested in continuity from scene to scene, or indeed from film to film, with a new paramour, new sets and surrounds, just a trio of returning characters (Keaton’s Wayne/Batman, Pat Hingle’s Commissioner Gordon, and Michael Gough’s faithful butler Alfred), and only cursory allusion to past events. The scene above also exemplifies Batman’s largely reactive rather than assertive status in proceedings.
Lest this seem like a hatchet job on Batman Returns, let me clarify: this film is good. Todd Phillips spent much of the Joker press tour boasting about smuggling a gritty 1970s-style art film into the mainstream. But almost three decades earlier, Burton made a $60+ million art film with a freakish villain raised by carnies who bites WASP noses, oozes both black bile and innuendo, and sends an army of rocket-wearing penguins on a suicide mission, and there was a McDonalds Happy Meal toy for said character. Much like Raimi on Darkman, Burton uses Batman Returns as a vehicle to create cool images and moments that interest him, and does so with little obligation to fandom, franchise-building, or corporate imperatives. Of the 1989–1992 batch of superhero movies, Batman was the most corporate and synergistic; The Rocketeer and Dick Tracy are similarly polished studio product, but the former is deeply earnest and the latter a labour of love for its director-star infused with his innate weirdness. While Batman has Burton’s fingerprints all over it, not unlike Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion-animated King Kong, Batman Returns has Burton’s fingerprints, smells, and breath all over it. Imagine the pottery scene in Ghost, but Burton is Patrick Swayze and Batman Returns is Demi Moore and the pot.
While I kid, the analogy is fitting. Despite costing a fortune, there’s a handmade quality to much of Batman Returns—from the fakeness and claustrophobia of its city sets populated by Gotham’s seemingly two dozen citizens to Catwoman’s outfit with its artfully visible stitches to Siouxsie and the Banshees on the soundtrack; far from slumming but a far cry from the precursor film’s wall-to-wall Prince music—which goes hand in hand with a sort of Goth teen nihilism that permeates the film. There’s more than a whiff of adolescent dysfunction to Batman Returns: Selina Kyle delivers an emo freakout for the ages, the Penguin hates everyone and wants to blow Gotham to smithereens, and Max Shreck is the conniving adult who betrays them both, and Batman is an ineffectual teacher.
Danny DeVito was renowned for playing scuzzbuckets, but never quite as intensely (or outwardly) as the Penguin, and he swings for the fences. Alas, a tacky celebrity of dubious moral character with utter contempt for the populace entering a major electoral race is no longer as far-fetched as it seemed. Pfeiffer similarly swings big, and while at times her performance is just a notch below Mommie Dearest, she navigates the role dexterously. The other romantic female leads of 1989–1992—Basinger, Headley, McDormand, and Connelly—are all damsels and at some point held captive by the villains. Where Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle is initially dominated by Schreck, she becomes a commanding protagonist. The character is part female empowerment, part drooling male gaze, and is a rare situation where both sides win, largely thanks to Pfeiffer’s excellent work. Whilst Batman is relegated to the status of an action figure missing a cape and a leg that nobody wants to play with in his own movie, Keaton once again essays his dual role with alacrity. Rounding out the lead quartet, Walken has fun as Shreck and Batman Returns deserves credit as one of the first films to knowingly harness the disjunction between the actor’s WASPy looks, otherworldly aura, and interplanetary cadence.
Batman Returns was a massive financial disappointment, earning only a quarter of a billion dollars. I jest, but the film weirded out punters, parents, and studio suits. I can’t really blame Warner Bros for wanting to make subsequent sequels more accessible, nor can I blame Burton and Keaton for abandoning ship, nor Michael Gough and Pat Hingle for staying aboard and cashing a cheque, nor Joel Schumacher for boarding the ship and pulling his own heist with Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, smuggling his own camp sensibility and preoccupations into the mainstream.
In addition to those Batman films in 1995 and 1997, the remainder of the 90s saw two more retro pulp efforts (The Shadow, The Phantom), a mixed bag of other comic book adaptations (Tank Girl, Barb Wire, Judge Dredd, The Mask, Spawn, Steel), and eventually the first Marvel hit (Blade) that paved the way for the next two decades.
Yet the potential and momentum of the class of 1989–1992 was never quite recaptured. They comprise a flawed but quite special collective: while uniform and undeniably relics in some respects, they’re idiosyncratic and aesthetically rich in others. Each does its own thing, and each is a blast to watch.
[1] Darkman made $48.8m on a budget of $16m; Dick Tracy made $162.7m on a budget of $47m; The Rocketeer made $46.7m on a budget of $40m.