Batman Forever: It’s Awful and I Love It

Apologies for the clickbait title. It’s not an accurate title, because I don’t think Batman Forever is a completely terrible movie, and I also don’t love it. A more accurate title would be something along the lines of “Why I am Still Fond of Batman Forever Despite Its Many Flaws,” but come on, that just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

The Joel Schumacher Batman movies don’t seem to be particularly well-remembered these days. When I think of Batman movies (which I often do, because Batman is one of the key pillars of my personality) I tend to think of the Dark Knight Trilogy, the Zack Snyder DC movies, Matt Reeves’ The Batman (which I love, might be the subject of next week’s post?), and the Tim Burton movies. The Schumacher films, 1995’s Batman Forever and 1997’s Batman & Robin, are more like afterthoughts.

I mean no disrespect to the late Joel Schumacher, though. Schumacher, who died from cancer in 2020, always struck me as being refreshingly unpretentious. He never acted like he thought he was some great artiste, he just wanted to make movies that would entertain people (that’s not to say that his movies didn’t have any artistic value, though). After Batman & Robin came out and everyone hated it, Schumacher apologized to anyone who was disappointed by it, and I respected him for that. And while I personally hate Batman & Robin and find it unwatchable, I don’t judge anyone who likes it as a so-bad-it’s-good movie.

But we are here to talk about Batman Forever. This movie was an important one for me personally. It’s one of the first movies I remember being really excited about seeing, and it’s one of the first “grown-up” movies I ever saw. It was also very important to me because of one person, and that person’s name was Nicole Kidman. When I saw this movie I was at that age when every single girl had cooties, and then I saw Batman Forever, and the second Nicole showed up onscreen I thought to myself, “maybe not all girls are gross.” Or at least that was the impression I was left with. I had this movie’s poster on my wall for years and I spent more time looking at her than I did looking at Batman.

Warner Bros.

This was the poster!

Batman Forever is peak 90’s cheese. Everything in it is so over-the-top that it makes the (also extremely weird) Tim Burton Batman movies look downright restrained. “Over the top” is the best description I could give for this film, and that goes for much of the acting as well. Time for a potentially unpopular opinion: I have never been a Jim Carrey fan. Lots of people love his movies, but I’ve never liked his schtick. It never struck me as acting, more like incessant mugging.

Carrey’s acting has always seemed so artificial to me, and I do not like him as the Riddler in Batman Forever. I find him insufferable and obnoxious. And while that may be somewhat intentional, since the Riddler is a bad guy and you’re not supposed to like him, every scene Carrey is in gets old for me very fast. Carrey’s Riddler is pretty similar to Frank Gorshin’s Riddler from the Adam West Batman TV show in the 60’s, so there’s that, I guess. But I don’t think anyone would cite Adam West’s Batman show as an example of good acting.

But Carrey is not the movie’s only over-the-top villain, oh no. There is also Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face, and he does his utmost to chew as much scenery as his villainous co-star. I’ve always felt that Two-Face, despite his ghoulish appearance, was one of the more grounded and sympathetic Batman villains. Look no further than Christopher Nolan’s classic The Dark Knight, which portrays Harvey Dent (Two-Face’s alter ego) as a good man trying his hardest to bring order to a chaotic city. Harvey’s downfall in that film is deeply tragic, and his story is woven into The Dark Knight’s narrative so well that he is a crucial part of the film. You get a real sense of Harvey as a person, making his descent into murderous madness even more tragic.

But Tommy Lee Jones’ portrayal of the character has no such nuance. When we meet Two-Face in Batman Forever, he is already a deranged murderer, and his backstory is only hinted at. All the nuance in Harvey’s character is completely absent, and that’s a shame. I would have liked to have seen what Jones could have done with the character in a more serious movie. Jones is a terrific actor, and while he is certainly capable of playing villains (like the deranged ex-CIA agent he plays in Under Siege), Jones’ Two-Face feels like a missed opportunity in Batman Forever. If they had toned it down and had Harvey be more sinister and less hammy, we could have had a classic movie villain instead of a generic cigar-chomping goofball.

Both the movie’s villains are so relentlessly goofy that they wear out their welcomes very quickly. Riddler has some evil plan that involves a device called The Box, which somehow steals people’s thoughts and transfers them to Riddler’s brain, or something. The movie is essentially a live-action cartoon, and there’s never any sense of threat from the villains because they’re just so…dumb. And annoying.

Warner Bros.

Look at this pair of doofuses.

So ok, I don’t like the villains. But what about the heroes? Batman/Bruce Wayne is played by Val Kilmer, and I’ve heard some people complain that Kilmer’s acting in this movie is dull and his performance is flat. But to me Kilmer’s acting here is less boring and more…restrained. He portrays Bruce as a soft-spoken guy, and I find his Bruce to be a welcome break from the goofy-ass villains. Bruce Wayne has never been the most expressive guy, and Kilmer’s performance feels true to the character. There is a weird subplot about Bruce having dreams about the murders of his parents, and there’s something about repressed memories, but it doesn’t go anywhere and feels tacked on. I’m not sure why this subplot is even in the movie, it adds nothing.

But I like Val Kilmer in this movie, and he’s especially good during the scenes where we get to see the real Bruce Wayne, not the fake Bruce Wayne that is his public persona. There’s a scene where he tells Dick Grayson that revenge won’t make his life better. He talks about how his pain doesn’t go away by fighting bad guys, it just grows. It’s a great moment and a very humanizing one, and you realize that Bruce doesn’t necessarily enjoy being Batman, and his crusade against crime has done nothing to bring him peace.

And that’s the frustrating thing about Batman Forever: there are occasional flashes of what could have been if the filmmakers hadn’t decided to make such a goofy movie. There’s a scene later where Edward Nygma (Riddler’s alter ego) confronts Bruce Wayne at a party and there’s a great little bit where Nygma puts his glasses on and takes them off again to match whatever Bruce is doing with his glasses, and you can tell that despite all the bullshit Nygma is still deeply insecure and constantly compares himself to Bruce. It’s a rare moment of subtlety in such a relentlessly stylized and frantic movie. I also like the scenes where Bruce and Alfred solve Nygma’s riddles together, and we get a sense of Batman’s detective skills.

And oh yeah, Robin is in this movie too. Robin/Dick Grayson is played by Chris O’Donnell, and he’s…fine. He’s a bit arrogant at first but you still sympathize with him because his parents were murdered by Two-Face. He becomes more likable later on and I think the movie does a pretty good job with Robin and spends quite a bit of time building the relationship and the trust between him and Bruce. Tim Burton had plans to put Robin in a Batman movie if he had made a third one but the underwhelming box office of Batman Returns led to a third Burton film being scrapped.

Warner Bros.

Let’s talk about Nicole Kidman again. She plays a psychiatrist named Dr. Chase Meridian, and her main character trait for much of the film is that she REALLY wants to bang Batman. After spending more time with Bruce, she realizes that she has a thing for Bruce instead of Batman, not knowing that they are one and the same. There’s the germ of an interesting idea here, and once again we see a glimpse of what could have been. But the movie doesn’t do anything interesting with it and is more interested in having Chase wear low-cut dresses and breathily whisper every line.

That’s not a bad thing per se, but it doesn’t make for the most interesting character. And while Kidman is still absolutely gorgeous in this film, I can’t help but think that her character could (and maybe should) have been more interesting. But I don’t think that’s Kidman’s fault, she does what she can with an underwritten character (and it bears repeating that she is mind-meltingly beautiful).

Warner Bros.

So I’ve talked a lot about the characters and acting. But what about the look of the movie? I’m of two minds about it. Schumacher’s Gotham City is neon-soaked and extremely stylized, and on the one hand I think the production designer did a great job with the level of detail in the look of the movie, but I also can’t help but find it garish and ugly at times. That goes for the costumes, too. Batman & Robin gets most of the blame for having Batsuits with nipples, but if you look closely the Batman and Robin suits in Batman Forever were the first ones to have nipples. Maybe they’re just more noticeable in Batman & Robin. Batman Forever also does those suiting-up montages with the infamous closeups of the butt and crotch regions, which is something that I am glad was left in the 90’s. I’ve also always liked the Batboat and Batplane that show up near the end of the movie, although it’s disappointing that they both get blown up so quickly.

Batman Forever is a movie with a LOT of problems, but it was still a hit. It was the second highest-grossing film of 1995 in the US (Toy Story was number one) and the sixth highest-grossing film worldwide, and the inevitable sequel, Batman & Robin, was released two years later to critical derision and underwhelming box office, and killed live-action Batman movies stone dead until Christopher Nolan revived the franchise with his genre-defining Dark Knight Trilogy. I’m not going to be writing about Batman & Robin because I hate it. Schumacher and Warner Bros. learned all the wrong lessons from Batman Forever and as a result Batman & Robin is an incomprehensible mess.

There were plans for a third Schumacher Batman film called Batman Unchained, which would have had NICOLAS FREAKING CAGE AS THE SCARECROW. There were even plans to bring back the previous actors who played villains in cameos during a hallucination Batman would have experienced after being dosed with Scarecrow’s fear gas. Not gonna lie, that sounds pretty awesome.

Watching Batman Forever today, it can’t help but feel like a relic of the 90’s. It’s a product of its time and a lot of it doesn’t hold up very well. But it has its share of entertaining moments and I still consider it to be an important film for me personally. Like I mentioned earlier, this is one of the first movies I ever got really excited about. I had t-shirts from this movie. I had tons of action figures (some of which I still have). I had the poster on my wall for years. I listened to the soundtrack constantly (who doesn’t remember the Seal song Kiss From a Rose, that song was huge). It was a big deal for me, and an important milestone in my movie-going life. For that, I still look back on it fondly, warts and all.

The Man-Eaters of Tsavo: The Ghost and the Darkness

The Ghost and the Darkness is a criminally underrated historical thriller from 1996 starring Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas that is based on the fascinating true story of the Man-Eaters of Tsavo. It received a very mixed reception when it was released, the film’s director Stephen Hopkins expressed mixed feelings about it and Roger Ebert hated it so much that he said it was one of the worst films of 1996. With all due respect to the late Mr. Ebert, I don’t know what the hell he was talking about. He must have seen a different movie from the one I saw, because the one I saw was damn good.

But first, some background. In 1898, the British were attempting to build a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. Over a period of nine months, from March to December of 1898, the building site was attacked by a pair of male lions who killed many of the workers. The lions were eventually killed by Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, the man in charge of overseeing the project. The lions were ferocious and cunning adversaries and the second one only died after Patterson shot it nine times. Patterson later wrote a book about his experiences which was published in 1907 (he also had the skins of the lions made into rugs, and later the skins were sent to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where they are still on display today).

Paramount Pictures

The historical accuracy of the book is debated, since Patterson may have exaggerated parts of the story. It’s hard to say for sure exactly how many people were killed by the lions. Reports from the time put the number at a staggering 135, but more modern studies suggest that the number was closer to around 30. Still, 30 people eaten by lions is a heck of a lot! Even then, that number might not be entirely accurate either since it only accounts for the number of people eaten by the lions, not necessarily the number of people killed but not eaten by the lions. We may never know the exact death toll.

Patterson’s book has been adapted to film several times, with The Ghost and the Darkness being the most recent cinematic telling of the story. The screenplay was written by William Goldman, who was an accomplished writer known for novels and screenplays, including Marathon Man and The Princess Bride. It was directed by Stephen Hopkins, who I know best as the director of Predator 2, which is a goofy but fun movie. Val Kilmer plays Patterson, and even though Patterson is unquestionably the film’s protagonist, he gets second billing to Michael Douglas, who plays an American big game hunter named Charles Remington.

Remington is a fictional character, though he was based to some extent on an actual person. Michael Douglas also produced the film and wasn’t originally going to act in it, but when they were having trouble casting Remington (Anthony Hopkins and Sean Connery turned it down), Douglas decided to play the character himself, which both Hopkins and Goldman have since expressed unhappiness with. When Douglas decided to play the character, the role was greatly expanded from what it was originally and the relationship between Douglas and Hopkins was tense. Hopkins has said that making the film was a nightmare and that he was never happy with the final product, although he was very complimentary of Val Kilmer.

This film had all the makings of a cinematic disaster: creative conflicts, difficult filming conditions, stars with massive egos, etc. In addition to animatronics designed by the great Stan Winston, the production also used real lions, so…yeah. I can imagine that would have been stressful, even if the lions they used for filming were for obvious reasons not as aggressive as the real-life man-eaters. But despite all these obstacles, The Ghost and the Darkness is an excellent film, so after all that preamble let’s talk about the film itself.

The film begins in London with Patterson being hired by an arrogant financier named Robert Beaumont to get the railway project in Kenya back on schedule. Beaumont gives Patterson five months, which Patterson finds agreeable since his wife is due to give birth to their first child in six months and he has promised her that he will be there for the child’s birth. It is a promise he will not be able to keep. Beaumont is played by the late Tom Wilkinson, who sadly passed away in December 2023. He was a very gifted actor, and he makes an impression in this film, despite only being in two scenes.

Upon arriving at the work site, Patterson meets Samuel, the foreman. Samuel is played superbly by John Kani, who played T’Challa’s father King T’Chaka in the Black Panther movies. Samuel is one of the most likable characters in the film, and he informs Patterson of a recent lion attack. That night Patterson kills an approaching lion and the next day the workers celebrate the danger having passed. Little do they know of the terror that lurks in the tall grass…

Some weeks later, a worker is dragged from his tent in the middle of the night and his remains are found the next day. Patterson and Samuel make the grim discovery that there are two man-eaters on the loose, which Samuel says has never happened before. The workers start to turn on Patterson, since the lion attacks started after he arrived at the camp. The workers also start calling the lions the Ghost and the Darkness, which are extremely badass nicknames, and the beasts take on an almost supernatural aura.

Patterson requests reinforcements but Beaumont denies his request. After all, Beaumont says, what will people think of the great British Empire if we can’t handle two measly lions? Tom Wilkinson is so great at making you hate Beaumont, he is a selfish prick who openly states he doesn’t care at all about the dead workers, he only cares about his bottom line. Sadly, you don’t get to see him get eaten. Ah, well.

A big game hunter named Charles Remington soon arrives at the camp. Remington’s brash personality initially clashes with Patterson’s more laidback demeanor, but the two develop a respect for each other and Kilmer, Kani, and Douglas are great together. After a series of tense and bloody confrontations in which many more workers are killed, the remainder decide to get the hell out of there while the getting’s good. You can’t blame them.

Paramount Pictures

Eventually Patterson, Remington, and Samuel are finally able to slay one of the beasts, but after a night of drinking and celebrating Patterson awakes from a nightmare to discover that the remaining lion has killed Remington. The scene in which Patterson and Samuel discover Remington’s corpse is extremely well-acted by Val Kilmer and John Kani. The two men don’t say a word. They silently burn him in a funeral pyre and light the tall grass on fire in order to drive the lion towards a trap they have set up on the partially completed bridge. The final confrontation occurs at night against the backdrop of the burning grass. Patterson and Samuel are at long last able to defeat the beast, and the film ends with the bridge being completed and Patterson reuniting with his wife and meeting his child.

Val Kilmer is great in this movie. He gives Patterson a slight Irish lilt which is enough to remind the viewer of Patterson’s Irish heritage but is never distracting. Kilmer had a reputation as being difficult to work with and when he made The Ghost and the Darkness he was coming off the release of The Island of Dr. Moreau, the production of which was an infamous disaster. But despite the negative press from that film, Stephen Hopkins said that Kilmer threw himself into the role of Patterson and had a passion for the film. I think it shows.

And while I’m not usually the biggest fan of Michael Douglas, I think he’s quite good in this film. Behind-the-scenes tomfoolery aside, Douglas is believable as a grizzled hunter and his banter with Patterson and Samuel provides much of the film’s emotional backbone. His death is genuinely sad, and Patterson and Samuel’s reactions to the discovery of his death is one of the film’s most emotionally moving moments.

I think this movie is terrific. The cinematography is great, the music by Jerry Goldsmith is rousing and chilling, the acting is great, the characters are likable, it’s scary and suspenseful, and it tells a fascinating true story. I don’t know what more you could ask for, honestly. This film’s negative reception upon its initial release makes no sense to me, and Ebert’s hatred of it in particular is utterly baffling. It’s a minor miracle that The Ghost and the Darkness even got made in the first place, since it had all the makings of an epic cinematic disaster: a troubled production, creative differences, a mixed reception, and disappointing box office. The fact that it turned out as good as it did despite all that is icing on the cake, and it makes me happy that the film has since found an audience and has a cult following.

Paramount Pictures

So there you have it, the last (for now!) of my series about killer animal movies. I hope you’ll agree that I saved the best film for last. I will probably revisit this topic in the future, since there is no shortage of killer animal movies to choose from and I have had a lot of fun watching and writing about these films. Next post is going to be about something different, but until then, as is tradition, here are my rankings of all the movies I’ve discussed over the last few posts.

FINAL RANKINGS:

1. The Ghost and the Darkness
2. Crawl
3. Alligator
4. Backcountry
5. Beast
6. Anaconda
7. Deep Blue Sea 3
8. Meg 2: The Trench
9. Alligator II: The Mutation
10. Staring at a blank wall for 82 minutes
11. Lake Placid (I hate this movie)