“It’s the so-called normal guys who always let you down. Sickos never scare me. At least they’re committed.” -Batman Returns (1992)

Batman Returns is the sequel to the 1989 film Batman.  The film starts with Oswald Cobblepot  (Danny Devito) being abandoned as an infant due to having a weird appearance. His parents put his crib in the river where he gets taken in by a flock of penguins. The film then jumps to thirty-five years later (a couple years after the events of the last film). A man named Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) tries to build a power grid for Gotham City so he can remove all the power from Gotham and take control of it. When his secretary, Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), discovers this plan, he pushes her out the window in the following scene:

Following this she has a mental breakdown and becomes Catwoman, a woman who becomes a criminal hell-bent on taking down Shreck. Meanwhile, the Penguin returns to Gotham City an runs for mayor but is thwarted by Bruce Wayne/Batman (Michael Keaton) when he reveals statements he made regarding how much he hates Gotham City.  Penguin tries to blow up gotham with his penguin army but is thwarted by batman. Catwoman tries to kill Shreck but Batman reveals he is Bruce Wayne to her as the two were dating, and persuades her to not kill him. Shreck then shoots Catwoman but she electrocutes him and herself.

As Bruce is driven away by his butler, Alfred, he thinks he sees Selena in an alleyway, but it turns out to just be one of her pet cats who he takes home with him. The movie ends with Selena sitting on a roof staring up at the bat-signal in the sky.

The movie focuses a lot more on the villains than on Batman.  According to this source from IMDB, the total amount of screen-time of Catwoman in the film was 33 minutes while the screen-time of Batman was a little over 31 minutes. In addition, pretty much all Batman really contributes to the plot is thwarting the villains plots throughout the movie. He stops Catwoman from sabotaging Shrecks business, he stops Penguin from getting Mayor, he stops Shreck from destroying the town and he stops Penguin from blowing up the town with his penguin army. I think this brings up an interesting idea behind the idea of crime-fighting movies requiring a villain, because without a villain, there is no need for the crime fighters and therefore there would be no movie. This interview with actor Danny Devito, who played the Penguin, does a great job at explaining the idea director Tim Burton had for the character.

He explains, “Tim [Burton] did a painting that he gave me it was very colorful kind of circus tents and there was a boy sitting in front of it that was Oswald as a toddler he didn’t have hands he had you know flippers and it’s kind of rotund and small and he had kind of weird pointed features….” By putting all of this effort into his characters, Tim did a great job at providing the  idea for his vision of how disfigured and grotesque the Penguin should be.

The films poster also does a great job at showing how much emphasis is put on the villains.

The poster shows all three of the main characters of the film stacked on top of each other. By including them all in equal parts on the poster the filmmakers are showing that they care equally about all three characters which is why they all got about the same amount of film time in the movie and why they all had their stories so well thought out.

In addition, the film went through an effort to make the main villains (Penguin and Catwoman) somewhat sympathetic, which hasn’t really been seen in that many super hero movies prior to that point. For example, in the last film, the villain, “Joker”, was hell-bent on destroying Gotham without a good reason which made his character not very sympathetic. While the Penguin was similar in that he wanted Gotham destroyed, he had a reason for wanting it destroyed with his traumatic background and history. Catwoman was also a very sympathetic character, having a rough life only to have her boss try to murder her and all she wants is to get revenge on him.  By allowing these characters to be sympathetic and have real motivations, they become more three-dimensional characters and can add more to the plot.

My largest complaint with the film was that the tone felt very inconsistent. There were times such as the confrontation with Selena and Bruce where the film felt very serious and dark. Several people liked the darkness that the film had to offer. Empire Online says,

“Gothic architecture, adorned with bizarre gargoyles, is constantly pow­dered with snow (Edward Scissorhands), the Danny Elfman score swells around the action like a tempestuous sea (Edward, Batman) and the oddball char­acters are constantly preoccupied with their outsider status (Edward, Batman, fee Wee’s Big Adventure). Indeed, despite Burton’s professed irritation at having his work described as “dark”, it is hard to conceive of film being any dark­er than Batman Returns if the audience are to see anything on the screen at all.”

While Batman is known for having lots of dark elements (with his nickname being The Dark Knight), there were a lot of elements of the film that just felt silly.  For example, in the following scene, Penguin has died and his penguin family brings him into the water to pay tribute.

The music and somber tone makes it seem like the movie should be serious, yet it is hard to ignore the silliness of penguins dragging a human corpse out to a lake as a form of respect for that human. This article written by critic David Ansen states, ” Entrusted with one of the most valuable franchises in movie history (the merchandising of ” Batman” brought in more than $500 million), he’s made a moody, grotesque, perversely funny $50 million art film.”

Despite the faults, the film was still fun and made me laugh, especially at the line, “Bruce Wayne? Why are you wearing a Batman costume?” But it still had its faults, though I do have tremendous respect for the film for adding layers to these one dimensional characters.