Where to begin... If your average man on the street were asked to name one movie starring Val Kilmer, they would almost all say Batman Forever. He is universally remembered for his leading role as Batman. It is likely to be listed someday in his obiturary. Unfortunately, it is one of the absolute worst movies made in the 1990s.
I'm a little worried about how to approach this post because it's hard to explain the many places where this movie went wrong. There's no fatal coup d'grace here - this is a movie that dies a slow death from a thousand little cuts. I would like to think that Kilmer was unaware of the shitshow in which he was participating. I'd like to think that he was a serious actor who tried to bring a unique voice to a brooding and complex character. As anyone whose seen "The Dark Knight" can attest, when properly executed, Batman can be one of the most engaging characters of the superhero universe. According to no higher source than Kilmer's IMDB trivia page, he had a terrible working relationship with Joel Schumaker but enjoyed playing Batman. I think the conventional wisdom has it that Joel Schumaker is the man responsible for this godawful mess of a movie. He was given a chance for vindication but somehow made an even worse follow up with 1997's Batman and Robin. His IMDB page reads as a sad list of regretted wastes of time and uninviting avoidable flops. The end result of Batman Forever is a series of poorly thought out characters that don't really connect with each other and a story that just has so many weird implausible and obvious ommissions of rational thought that it's more puzzling than any of Jim Carrey's riddles.
I'll give you an example. Bruce Wayne is touring his factory when he spies the Bat-signal on the night sky (the lighting and full staff would suggest it's daytime). He quickly takes his leave of the factory tour (which, we're given the impression that he almost never visits this facility at all) and goes to his office which is apparently in this same unfrequented building. He goes to his desk and presses a button and a hole in the floor opens up that feeds him (in a sort of casket) through a tunnel at speeds of 200 miles per hour down to the batcave. Now, leave aside for a moment the fact that someone other than Bruce Wayne or Alfred would have to have built high speed slide by covertly creating a pipe that travels to the rurual Wayne Manor. Wouldn't the cleaning staff notice a big fucking trap door under this guy's desk?
Nicole Kidman plays a forensic psychologist who, when she's not busy acting totally slutty to both Bruce Wayne and Batman, offers inaccurate psychological insights into the mind of Two Face. Thankfully, I screened this film with a Psychology PhD candidate who was able to point out Kidman's many errors. For example, Kidman quite quickly diagnoses Two Face as having "Obsessive Disorder with homocidal features." Now maybe it's splitting hairs to point out that this doesn't exist, but if the script for Batman Forever was anything more than Joel Schumaker scribbling notes on a bar napkin, they could have called an actual psychologist to at least make an attempt at writing in something that's not totally made up. There's no shortage of actual psychologists in Los Angeles. Also, another unexplainable moment occurs when Bruce Wayne goes to visit her office in City Hall. He hears aggravated female grunts and hitting sounds. When he breaks down the door he finds her in the middle of a punching bag workout... in the middle of the day... in an enormous office at City Hall. What kind of psychologist is she that she has a punching bag in the middle of her office? It's not explained, it's just out there.
Perhaps the most blatant error of this movie is that with two supervillains, they decided to give them not one original voice. Instead, both Jim Carrey as The Riddler, and Tommy Lee Jones as Two Face, play cackling evil maniacs in the same way that Jack Nicholson played the Joker in the first of the modern series of Batman movies.
Compare this (about a minute and a half in):
With this:
It's a goddamn travesty. This ruined everyone who touched it for quite a while. Jim Carrey's never FULLY rebounded, Tommy Lee Jones had Men In Black but otherwise... tsk tsk, and Val Kilmer began a slow strange decent into his present trajectory. Only Michael Keaton has suffered a worse Batman curse.
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