Film

Batman (1989)

Director: Tim Burton

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

In everything but its commercial success, Batman most resembles Lynch's Dune: plotless, unfocused, barely held together by mind-blowing sets, gadgets and costumes, and by director Burton's visual flair. It begins with promising angles - is Batman crazed vigilante or hero? Will journos Vicki Vale (Basinger) and Alex Knox (Wuhl) win the Pulitzer for discovering him? Why does Bruce Wayne spend millions dressing up as a bat? - but all are abandoned half-way through for a straight slugging match between Good and Evil. Cackling, dancing, killing for sheer humour value and hogging the best one-liners, Nicholson's Joker makes The Witches of Eastwick seem restrained and pulls off the greatest criminal coup of the decade: stealing a whole movie. Though Keaton is a perfect Bruce Wayne, at the heart of the film, where a noir-ish, psychologically disturbed Batman should be, there are only a small actor and a couple of stunt doubles in an inflexible rubber suit. Basinger's role, on the other hand, is over-inflated, presumably in order to prove by her prescence, as with Aunt Harriet in the '60s series, that there's nothing kinky about a hero who likes to dress up in cape and leathers. In the end, one's reaction to Burton's blockbuster is little more than that of the Joker to Batman: 'Where did he get those wonderful toys?'

---

• 
•