150 Word Review: 'Batman Returns' (1992)
Cool cat
Forget Die Hard: this is the connoisseur’s anti-Christmas movie.
Tim Burton’s follow-up to 1989’s Batman, Batman Returns, does two things right. First, Michelle Pfeiffer is at the peak of her powers as Catwoman. She gives her meowing, leather-slathered night prowler a brokenness that’s touching. Danny DeVito is at the top of his game as a self-pitying penguin-shaped crime boss. His minions? Circus clowns.
Second, most superhero movies try to fit the main character into the real world. Burton flips that: his Gotham is a vast haunted mansion where a flamboyant bat vigilante punches crooks.
Michael Keaton wasn’t always sufficiently praised as the Dark Knight; his Bruce Wayne is charmingly unwell. There’s a melancholy scene where Keaton and Pfeiffer, maskless, realize they’re psychos who wear masks. Too bad; they’re so good together. Cristopher Walken is a grinning, scheming, real estate developer/scumbag; the other baddies are misunderstood freaks, but not the capitalist.