Batman Forever Director: Joel Schumacher

Rip It Up, Issue 215, 1 July 1995, Page 41

Batman Forever Director: Joel Schumacher

In which Bruce Wayne (aka Batman) fights fresh villainy in the form of the leering Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones, with an acid two-tone) and the Riddler (Jim Carrey, spending much of the film in a lime green lycra body suit, with an orange Annie Lennox coif). Tim Burton has handed this instalment of the

Gotham City Chronicles to Joel Schumacher, and Schumacher’s done a slick job. He knows how to make the most of an opening shot — remember the traffic jam in Falling Down, or the children in the forest in The Client? — this time round it’s stylish fetishism, as Batman dons his rubbers. Indeed, Batman Forever may well be the campest instalment since the 60s TV series: from Two Face’s mini army of pierced, masked menacers, to the flamboyant Riddler.

Schumacher himself started his career in the art department, and Batman Forever is a stunning visual experience. There are a number of fantastical scenes, like the expressionist Gotham Circus which provides the setting for the assassination of Robin’s family, ending with a marvellous overhead shot as the orphaned Robin looks down on the three sprawling bodies. Schumacher’s design team includes Barbara Ling, whose talents lay behind David Byrne’s

quirky True Stories, and they magpie their way from Russian Constructivism to dizzy psychedelia — when Robin has a scuffle with a street gang, it’s a riot of day-glo and blue lighting. No choreographer is credited, but much of the action has a touch of the ballet — I’m thinking here of Batman’s entrance at the Nygmatech party, or the scene in which the villains invade the Wayne mansion. In his spry demolition of the Batcave, Jim Carrey seems to be making a play for being seen as the Ann Miller of our time. It’s not all visual chic, though. A crisp script makes for some scrumptious repartee when Batman first meets up with Nicole Kidman’s glamorous criminal psychologist, Dr Chase Meridian, and the first encounter between Jones and Carrey is deliriously manic. Perhaps, after the ceaseless inventiveness of the first 90 minutes, enlisting every hightech device known to FX, the climax is strangely disappointing. However, the dethroned Carrey, disconsolate in his spangles, like a drag queen who’s weathered a thunderstorm, is a brilliant touch. At the end, in a scene at Arkham Asylum, a short appearance from Rene Auberjonois as Dr Burton (cute touch this) is perhaps more significant than it seems, but vital questions remain unanswered — certainly Chris O’Donnell’s Wonder Boy is just too cute to be left partnerless at the end.

WILLIAM DART