Batman Forever (1995)

Batman Forever was just terrible. The first two films by Tim Burton were great. I think it was a real mistake to start going so cartoonish. The series got even worse after this film (Batman and Robin was atrocious) but this film was really bad itself. A stupid story, dumb characters doing dumb things, hammy over acting, stupid direction, awful writing. This movie stinks.

Better than Batman and robin but still mediocre film. It tries too hard to combine Tim Burtons characters with their campy earlier versions. The result is unsatisfying movie thats more of a product than a actual piece of decent scripting!

Batman Forever was a sign of things getting truly batshit crazy for the Batman franchise. The last two films were great iterations of The Dark Knight but Warner Brothers wanted things to be lightened-up for younger audiences as opposed to Tim Burton's German-Expressionistic style of directing. Enter Joel Schumacher, the man who eventually crippled the franchise with Batman & Robin TWO YEARS after he did Batman Forever. Well, at least he kept his style of filmmaking consistent with the two movies: hamming it up to the point of no return, until Chris Nolan resurrected the franchise with Batman Begins in 2005 (thank Christ).So, is this film so sinfully bad that anyone who likes it deserves to be crucified to high-heaven and back? No. But it's not all that good either. Batman Forever has become a widely forgotten-about blockbuster because of how inoffensive it was. It still is, but the precedent it set for Batman & Robin was not. This so-so movie was just a sign of things to come in the broader sense of things.As a lifelong Batman fan, I can easily this is one Batman film you can happily skip during your next Batman-athon. This is filler material incarnate.

(Flash Review)Watching this after a couple 60's French heist films was an abrupt switch as this was an explosion of wild and garish visuals and jarring pacing with aggressive shot framing. Once I got into mental rhythm it started to grow on me after a lackluster beginning. It grew on me due to Jim Carrey perfectly getting into the role of The Riddler. He stole the show for me and easily overshadowed Kilmer as Batman. This time Batman is up against Two-Face as he wrongly assumes Batman was the reason for his facial disfigurement and then also The Riddler who transforms himself from a computer genius into The Riddler striving to build a device to drain all the information from all the brains in Gotham. To top all that off, Batman's future partner Robin is introduced and then mix in a romantic angle with Kidman as Dr. Chase Meridian and you have many interesting storylines that are sufficiently intertwined. The humor in this was more deliberate, felt more comic-like and had more sexual innuendos. The scene esthetics felt more busy than the first two and the effects looked more fake and dated than the 'older' movies ironically. Overall, this was still wild fun yet loses a bit of the original Burton magic for me.