Critics reviews

It's a deconstructive superhero film, and not in the Zack Snyder sense of too-cool-for-this posturing, positing superheroes as gods in thorough need of a Richard Dawkins to take them down. Batman Returns is fascinated and captivated by the kind of man who'd want to put on a bat costume and save people, digging deep into that man's psyche and finding gnarled and depraved horrors just beneath.

I haven't seen the film in many, many years, and it is somehow even weirder than I remember. (Also, I don't think I realized until now that Christopher Walken's bewigged Max Shreck was supposed to be a parody of Donald Trump...) Batman is barely in the first 45 minutes of the film, and so much of it plays as a morbid black comedy, contrasting the grotesquerie of the Penguin and Catwoman and the fascist architecture of Gotham with the relative wholesomeness of Michael Keaton's Dark Knight.

Tim Burton's BATMAN RETURNS (1992, 126 min, 35mm) is a vision of sexual expansiveness, one of the dirtiest PG-13 films ever made. [It's] easily the best Batman movie... BATMAN RETURNS is an anarchic, transgressive morality tale in which the conventional crime fighter and his conventional foe are equally in the wrong, in which the city is saved by the destruction of the order it tried so hard to enshrine.

[The characters'] portentous stories interlace, and despite the archetypal fights and comic-book raillery, Burton enraptures us with the characters' dueling selves and leaves us saddened by a sense of abandonment.

Nothing in it is plausible—even the Bat signal defies logic, its luminescent silhouette cast upon absolutely nothing in the sky. From the demon circus kidnapping children with freak-show trains to the climactic showdown with Batman cruising through cavernous sewers in a speedboat and penguins with rockets strapped to their backs, Batman Returns is Guignol of the Grandest caliber.

How much of a dent can it make when it has virtually no characters, no plot, no fictional world, no mise en scene, no ideas, no developed feelings, no inspiration, no adventure, no sense of inner necessity beyond its status as an investment and marketing tool? It's arrested development on every possible level.