Well, what totally planned and intentional synergy. It’s Pride month and just in time to talk about how Joel Schumacher made Batman gay.

Amongst many Bat-fans, the Schumacher Batman films are looked on as a dark age and I would argue that, much like the real dark ages, that’s entirely unfair.

Okay, mostly unfair.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Joel Schumacher is a better director than Tim Burton. Objectively, he’s not. Burton’s Batman films (Returns in particular) are beautiful gothic wonderlands. Schumacher’s vision for Gotham, by contrast, is a grimy industrial hellscape inexplicably drenched in garish neon. It’s ugly and weird and gaudy and kinda cheap looking. But ask yourself, is that really such a bad artistic choice for a Batman movie?

In fact…I’m just going to say it, Joel Schumacher came closer to capturing the feel of Bronze Age Batman than just about any other live action director. Doesn’t mean his films are the best necessarily. But I think the man deserves more respect than he gets, i.e., any amount of respect.

But we get ahead of ourselves.

Batman Returns only made around half of what its prequel did which was still enough to make it one of the biggest hits of the year. But Warner Bros keenly felt that they had left money on the table. There was a definite feeling that the next bat film needed more Happy Meal tie ins and less cat-ladies in gimp suits and weird sewer perverts. This was going to be a more kid-friendly, less nasty and absolutely more marketable affair. And it is, to a degree that admittedly gets pretty obnoxious. Take, for instance, the very first line of dialogue. As Batman gets ready to enter the new Batmobile Alfred asks.

“Can I persuade you to take a sandwich with you, sir?”

To which Batman answers: “I’ll get drive through” and the Batmobile rockets out into the night.

Which, you know what? You see that in the cinema in 1995 and you might chuckle. That’s a cute little bit. But then you go home and you turn on your TV and you see:

And you feel USED.

Anyway, in another obviously planned bit of timing, as I publish this the news has broken that a much longer “Schumacher cut” of this movie exists and that we might actually get to see it if Warner Bros can convince us to pay for old pictures of when they were still pretty. And I can well believe that this movie is a heavily truncated version because it actually begins in media res with Batman racing out to stop Two-Face who is already a super-villain and in the middle of robbing the second bank of Gotham. Sigh. Okay, let’s talk about Two-Face for a minute. Or two.

So, Two-Face is widely considered to be in the very top tier of Batman rogues and one of the characters that even people who’ve never read a comic have probably heard about. This is doubly (I swear I didn’t do that on purpose) impressive when you consider that he was deemed too gruesome for the sixties series and missed out on the massive pop of exposure that show brought to other rogues like the Joker, Riddler, Penguin and Catwoman.

And here’s where I have to commit some Grade A Bat-heresy.

Two-Face is a terrible villain.

Now some of you may be furiously typing in the comments something on the lines of “what about “insert all-time classic Batman story here”?”

But here’s the thing. I will bet you good money that the story you’re citing is not a Two-Face story, but a Harvey Dent story. Because Harvey Dent is a fantastic character. Batman’s great failure. The good man who tried to face Gotham’s madness and was eaten alive by it. That’s all gangbusters. But I had a realization watching this movie: every great Two-Face story I’ve ever read or watched; Eye of the Beholder, The Dark Knight Returns, the “Two-Face” two parter from The Animated Series…they are all either retellings of the origin story with Dent dealing with his descent into madness as Big Bad Harv takes control, or they’re tragedies of a seemingly reformed Dent realising that he can’t escape and slipping back into being Two-Face.

You see what I mean? They’re all stories about Harvey Dent becoming Two-Face. When he actually is Two-Face? When he’s robbing the second bank of Gotham on February 22nd? He sucks! He just sucks. His gimmick is the number two. I swear to God, this is not hyperbole, FUCKING CALENDAR MAN is a thematically stronger villain. And sure, the idea of a bad guy whose actions are dictated by the flip of a coin sounds like it could make for a terrifyingly chaotic and unpredictable villain.

But in practice, it just means you have a villain who is 50% less dangerous than a regular dude with a gun. And that there is a one in two chance that Batman will win because Two Face just decides to surrender.

Which is a very long-winded way to say that I think this movie shoots itself in the foot by ignoring the origin story and having Harvey be Two-Face from the off. And then Tommy Lee Jones’ performance shoots the movie in the other foot and kicks it in the balls for good measure.

Arriving at the scene, Batman is introduced to Doctor Chase Meridian (Jesus CHRIST) who looks and sounds and is named like an ad for high-priced cologne. Chase Meridian (A new fragrance. By Calvin Kline) is a psychologist specialising in the real nutbars and she and Batman psychobabble at each other for a bit over Two-Face’s likely goals. And, oh my, this movie is an absolute treasure trove of lines where not so smart writers try to write smart people.

• Dr. Chase Meridian: Like you. – Well, let’s just say that I could write a hell of a paper on a grown man who dresses like a flying rodent.
• Batman: Bats aren’t rodents, Dr. Meridian
• Dr. Chase Meridian: Really? You ARE interesting.

I mean sure. That’s interesting to someone who didn’t read the Usborne Big Book of Animals growing up but I would have expected the world’s FOREMOST EXPERT ON ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY to be a bit harder to impress.

Anyway, Batman storms the bank and beats up most of Two-Face’s goons but then gets trapped in the bank vault with one of the security guards. You know how there are no small parts, only small actors?

Mwah. Shakespeare like it was meant to be played!

Batman succeeds in saving Olivier and the cash from the BOILING ACID but Two-Face escapes.

The next day Bruce Wayne visits one of his labs and meets scientist and walking “Hi” Tinder Message Edward Nygma, who pitches him on a TV that beams images directly into the mind. And tech billionaire Bruce Wayne essentially says “No. Needlessly tampering with the human brain is insanely dangerous and unethical. We’re not doing that.”

Bruce then sees the bat-signal in the sky and makes one of his patented “totally not suspicious” exits. Nygma doesn’t take this well and swears to Bruce that he will “make you understand”.

Changing into his Batman duds, Bruce heads over to Police Headquarters and finds Chase Meridian (Pour homme. Pour femme.) waiting for him. She tells him that she’s figured out Two-Face’s weakness; that he always needs to use his coin to make decisions and Bruce is all:

Even in the movie this is presented like Chase being an absolute basic bitch. She then admits that she really arranged this meeting just to climb the bat-pole if you catch my drift.

I’m talking about his penis.

Gordon (or as he’s known by the boys down town, “Commissioner Cock Block”) arrives and Batman bids a hasty retreat.

Later that night, Nygma’s boss Strickly finds him running more experiments on the Brain Box and demands that he stop. So Nygma knocks him unconscious and plugs him into the box. This has the unexpected side-effect of draining Strictly’s intelligence and making Nygma smarter. Okay, cards on the table. I love Jim Carrey as the Riddler.

I will not be taking questions at this time.

I think the backlash to his performance (apart from joyless sad sacks who don’t enjoy Jim Carrey. Or fun. Or being able to bring someone to orgasm) is that he’s clearly continuing the work done by Frank Gorshin. Back in the nineties, the Adam West show was still something of a sore spot for many batfans. Now though, as we’ve started to realise that the Adam West Batman was actually the tops, can we not find it in our hearts to admit that this Riddler is exactly what this movie needs? This movie is more interested in Bruce Wayne than the previous two and most of the darker elements come from him, not the two villains. So a lighter, frothier villain is a good fit, I feel. Plus, when he wants, to Carrey is actually very good at bringing real menace.

After pushing Strickly out of a window, Nygma manipulates the CCTV footage to make it look like he killed himself, a detail which was ridiculous when the movie came out but now feels perfectly plausible. Bruce visits the lab and insists that Strickly’s family gets full benefits despite his death being ruled a suicide and his assistant reminds him that he still has to find a date to see the circus. You know, I kinda feel that if there was any city where a circus would not be welcomed it would be Gotham. It just seems like that would be viewed as being in poor taste.

Bruce then finds a creepy greeting card with a riddle on it at his office and another waiting for him at home, so he takes them to Chase Meridian (I…don’t know any more cologne taglines). Oh, funny story. I’ve been googling “cologne” and “Batman” so much that the algorithm has started trying to sell me Batman themed cologne.

Anyway, she tells him that whoever sent him the riddles is a psycho crazy killer and, visibly aroused by her professionalism, he invites her to the thircuth. No seriously, Val Kilmer lisps the word “circus” so bad and I can’t believe nobody caught it

At the thirtcuth, they watch thome thircuth acrobath called the Flying Graythonth thoar and thwing through the air over the trapeeth. One of these is a young lad named Dick Grayson who looks just about old enough to run for president of the United States.

Suddenly, the circus is taken hostage by Two-Face and his Goons and he tells the crowd that somewhere in Gotham is a nuclear bomb and that one Gotham citizen has the trigger…wait, wrong movie. He tells them that he has a bomb and that if somebody in the crowd doesn’t reveal Batman’s real identity he’ll blow the Big Top sky high. And this is where I suddenly realise that I actually love this Batman.

Know what he does? He stands up and yells “HARVEY, I’M BATMAN!”

No hesitation. He just does it. People are going to die and his secret identity isn’t worth that. He just fucking does it. Like, y’know, a hero.

Obviously, it doesn’t work because the whole crowd is screaming but I love that moment. Anyway, he changes into Batman and fights Two-Face’s mooks while the Flying Graysons work to get the bomb out of the tent and into the river. The succeed in saving the circus but Dick’s parents and brother are killed.

Not wanting Dick to be taken away by Adult Services, Bruce offers to let Dick stay in Wayne Manor. Dick agrees, because if you’re plotting revenge against the man who killed your parents, you might as well do it in style. Bruce has a flashback to his parents’ murder, and blurts out to Alfred “I killed them”.

Before he can chew that little nugget of undigested trauma the Bat signal lights up and he has to head out. Alfred helps Dick unpack and asks about his helmet, which has a robin painted on it.

Dick tells Alfred that he got the nickname “Robin” after he saved his brother from falling by flying out “like a Robin”. He bitterly muses “some hero I turned out to be” and Alfred replies “ah, but you are a hero. I can tell.”

Meanwhile, Nygma crashes Two-Face’s lair and offers him an alliance, seed money to build and market the box to every home in Gotham in exchange for Batman’s true identity. With impressive speed, they manage to steal enough money from jewellers and banks to build a business empire and freaking DOOM FORTRESS in Gotham Bay.

Meanwhile, Dick discovers the Batcave and takes the Batmobile for a joyride which requires Batman to rescue him from a mob of angry day-glo neon street thugs. Back at the Batcave, Dick asks Bruce to train him so that he can kill Two-Face. Batman replies:

Bruce Wayne: Then it will happen this way: You make the kill, but your pain doesn’t die with Harvey, it grows. So you run out into the night to find another face, and another, and another, until one terrible morning you wake up and realize that revenge has become your whole life. And you won’t know why.

See what I mean? Yeah, the movie is corny. And cheesy. And often stupid. But it gets the fundamentals of Batman right in a way that amazingly many adaptations don’t.

Nygma unveils his “new improved” box at a gala unveiling which raises the question as to how the hell long this movie’s timescale even is. Nygma has managed to put a box in virtually every home in Gotham and is now rolling out the Playstation 2, essentially, which should mean a gap of at least a few years, right?

Anyway, with Chase as his date, Bruce attends the gala and investigates the box, only to have his mind unwittingly scanned. Two-Face and his Goons attack the gala (man works hard, give him that) and we get yet another confrontation between him and Batman than almost ends in Bruce’s death before he’s rescued by the Adult Boy Wonder.

Later that night, Batman visits Chase and they share a kiss. But she breaks it off, saying that she’s realised that she’s in love with someone else. So now, Bruce has to make a decision.

1. Keep risking his life and the lives of those he cares about by being Batman.
2. Knock it all on the head and get with Nicole Kidman.

He invites Chase over to Wayne Manor to tell her the truth. But when she knocks over a vase with some roses it triggers a flashback to the night of his parents funeral, when he ran out into the night, fell into the Batcave and saw the bat that bit him and turned him into Spider-man. Chase kisses him and realises who he is (the bat story wasn’t clear enough, apparently). Before they seal the deal however, the manor is attacked by Two-Face and Riddler who learned his real identity from the box. Bruce is knocked unconscious, the Batcave is bombed to smithereens and Chase is kidnapped.

Fortunately, Batcaves are like ogres and onions; they are lairs with layers, and though the Batmobile is destroyed, the Batwing and the Batboat are fine. Dick shows up in a new costume that Alfred made for him and Batman says “ah fuck it, welcome to the team”.

They travel to the Riddler’s corporate doom fortress and we get THE LINE. Now, this screenplay had three writers so we’ll never truly know who was responsible Akiva Goldsman this has Akiva Goldsman all over it.

• Robin: Holey rusted metal, Batman!
• Batman: Huh?
• Robin: The ground, it’s all metal. It’s full of holes. You know, holey.
• Batman: Oh.

Robin confronts Two-Face and almost kills him but spares him because ultimately revenge is a worthless hollow pursuit that kills both he who it is visitied upon and he who exacts it and truly mercy is what separates us from the…

Robin is kidnapped and, when Batman reaches Riddler’s lair, he’s presented with a final riddle; can Batman and Bruce Wayne co-exist. He has to choose whether to save Chase or Robin.

Naturally, he chooses option C: Save both of them and kick your ass because I’m the goddamn Batman.

He destroys the brainwave receiver which overloads the Riddler’s brain and rescues both of the hostages. Two-Face just dies and it’s no one’s fault let’s just move on. His mind utterly scrambled, Riddler is committed to Arkham Asylum (in its first onscreen appearance in live action) and the movie ends with Batman and Robin beginning their new partnership that everyone is going to just love.

***

Corny, campy and shamelessly corporate and yet…I think Schumacher honestly came closer to creating a live-action version of the comic universe these stories take place in than any other director who tackled the character. Nolan, Snyder and Reeves all tried to “fix” Batman and make him work in the “real’ world. Burton just did a Burton movie with a character that superficially resembled Batman. But with Schumacher, despite all his excess and corniness, I at least feel like he cracked open a few Batman comics (and not just the ones written by Frank Millar) and said “Oh cool. Let’s just do this”.

Oh, and lest we forget, this movie gave us this absolute banger:

The Dark Knight Detective

Possibly the must underrated Batman. Kilmer isn’t quite classically handsome enough to fully resemble comics Bruce Wayne but he gives the character a studious, intellectual seriousness that really works. He’s a got a great Batman voice and both Kilmer as an actor and Schumacher as a director actually seem interested in what makes Bruce tick psychologically. Unlike Keaton’s Batman, who sometimes came across as a lunatic who fought villains by coincidence, Kilmer’s Batman is actually…heroic.

The Boy Wonder

Look, I know we all love to shit on Chris O’Donnell’s Robin but, put aside your hatred of Batman and Robin and judge him here on his own merits. He’s actually pretty darn good here as an angry young man out for revenge. I mean, yeah, he is ridiculously old for the part but he’s a lot better than he’s given credit for.

His Faithful Manservant

Another thing that Schumacher did better than Burton? Realising what a gift he’d been given in Michael Gough’s Alfred. Alfred gets a lot more screentime in the Schumacher films and that’s to their eternal credit.

The Clown Prince of Crime

Yeah, I had completely forgotten this but, if we accept that this movie takes place in the same continuity as the Burton movies, then the shadowy figure we see gun down the Waynes in flashback is the Joker.

The Prince of Puzzles

Jim Carrey is doing Frank Gorshin’s Riddler performance infused with angry-virgin energy and no safeword and I realise that that’s not for everyone.

It’s for me.

Meet the most bizarre criminal of all time, a twentieth century Jekyll-Hyde!

Okay, before I completely torpedo any remaining credibility…this just does not work.

I love Tommy Lee Jones, truly. But he always plays Tommy Lee Jones. That’s as it should be. They took a man famous for only playing one man, and cast him as a man famous for being two men. That’s some real shitty math.

The Comish

Pat Hingle’s Gordon has reached full buffoon apotheosis, showing up beside the Bat signal in his nightdress and babbling incoherently like Grandpa off his meds.

Our Plucky Sidekicks

Chase Meridian (God, that name) is straight out of the “hack nineties screenwriter’s guide to writing Strong Female Characters TM” i.e., sexually harrassing every mammal with a dick in a five mile radius. However, she has the good fortune to be played by Nicole Kidman who is an all time GOAT at finding nuance and layers to otherwise shallow archetypes. Even when handicapped by having to spout meaningless psychobabble, Meridian actually helps Bruce Wayne on his character journey. And she even has an arc of her own, overcoming her own fascination with damaged unnattainable men to see the humble handsome billionaire standing right in front of her. And there are moments. There’s a bit where she kisses Bruce Wayne and realises that he’s Batman and she gives this beautiful little smile.

Wonderful.

Batman NEVER kills, except: 

Hey, know what’s a pleasant side-effect of wanting to sell more Happy Meals? This Batman isn’t a PSYCHOTIC MANIAC. There’s a few edge cases. Batman dodges a bazooka rocket from Two-Face which blows up the henchman driving up behind him but, no, that’s on Two-Face. Some more henchmen die crashing into a wall chasing after the Batmobile but, again, nobody made them drive recklessly. Batman does fling coins at Two Face which causes him to spaz out and fall to his death but

a) Justifiable self-defence.

b) He was just trying to distract Two-Face, not kill him.

This Batman passes the “not a murderer” test.

Where does he get those wonderful toys?: 

We get a new redesigned, Gieger-esque Batwing and Batboat which are just gorgeous. Batman uses a Bat-Net Gun, a Bat Taser and a Bat Blow Torch and we see the return of the remote controlled Batarang. I’m missing plenty, this is a very gadget heavy film.

It’s the car, right? Chicks dig the car:

With the partial destruction of the Batmobile in the previous film we get this Formula 1 looking thing with a shark fin that jiggles noticeably when in motion.

I don’t like it. When I see the Batmobile driving down the street I should think “Man, I don’t want to mess with that guy” not “I bet the guy who drives that is a massive chode”. Chicks may dig the car. Mouse does not.

FINAL SCORE OUT OF TEN:

NEXT UPDATE: 29 June 2023

NEXT TIME: It’s a world of laughter
A world of tears
It’s a world of hopes
And a world of fears
There’s so much that we share
That it’s time we’re aware
It’s a small world after all