Tim Burton’s kinetic and kinky sequel pushed the boundaries for the summer movie template helped by a standout movie star turn from Michelle Pfeiffer
It’s certainly a more idiosyncratic movie than its predecessor, Tim Burton’s record-breaking popcorn sensation Batman, released to teeming, cheering crowds in the summer of 1989. To lure Burton back to the world of the caped crusader, Warner Bros had to offer him greater creative control over the sequel. The director exercised it from top to bottom. In place of the original’s art deco noir aesthetic, Batman Returns goes full baroque fairytale.
Bruce’s problems are doubled, his screen-time halved. Just about everyone agrees that Jack Nicholson’s Joker stole the first Batman. The second surrenders the spotlight to the rogues’ gallery immediately, depriving Keaton of any dialogue for the opening half-hour. The movie belongs more to Danny DeVito’s deformed, anguished Oswald Cobblepot, AKA the Penguin, and to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Selina Kyle, reborn into the vengeful, vamping Catwoman.
Waters’ plot is lumpy, forcing an illogical allegiance between the villains. No matter – for Burton, it’s just an excuse to collide these outsized cartoon personalities, to build a vaudeville stage for three tortured, animal-themed outlaws. The director twists that classic Batman theme of the bad guys being warped reflections of the good guy to suit his own enduring love affair with misfits.
If the political contest suggests a classic Preston Sturges comedy in superhero drag, there’s a touch of Ernst Lubitsch to the screwball romance between Keaton and Pfeiffer, circling each other in different forms of evening wear, concealing their double lives, secret identities and battle scars during a fireside canoodle.
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