Batman Forever at 30

A Val Kilmer Tribute post

Waking to the news of Val Kilmer’s passing recently was kind of a bummer for me. I hadn’t thought much about him lately, but when I was younger and cared about things, I found Val’s performances strangely compelling. In the pre-internet days, you really only heard about Hollywood gossip in magazines, and I remember reading that Val was rather difficult on sets, and was in general, kind of a weirdo. Who knows if any of it was true, but whether it was or not, I still was drawn to him. Maybe because I was a bit of a weirdo myself. I knew his health was not great, and he had probably lived pretty hard as a young actor, but 65 is still young for someone to pass away, and it did make me a little sad.

After seeing him as Doc Holliday in Tombstone in 1993 (which you can read my Substack on that movie below), I thought Kilmer was The Man. I guess I wasn’t the only one either because it was not long after that he landed one of the biggest roles a guy could get in those days: Batman.

Even though the first two Batman movies by Tim Burton were hugely successful, Warner Brothers executives wanted to go in a different direction and basically sell more toys for the third installment. Burton and Warner agreed that he would not direct the next one, but Burton would remain as a producer. Joel Schumacher signed on to direct, and originally Michael Keaton was to return in the title role. They were working with the scriptwriters to bring in more elements from the comics, and even considered doing an adaptation of Batman; Year One, but the studio didn’t want a prequel, so that idea was axed. Eventually, Keaton didn’t really like where all this was going, and passed on the movie altogether. At the time, that was a pretty big deal, and may have signalled some ominous things on the horizon.

Still, the casting of Kilmer was, to me, a different direction, but not necessarily a bad one. Val was younger, and the real key to playing any superhero onscreen is being able to play his alter-ego. At the time, I thought Val would be able to handle Bruce Wayne, and if you can do that, then being Batman should be a piece of cake. And I’ll be honest, watching the movie as an adult, I think I was right. Interestingly enough, Kilmer apparently signed on to Batman Forever because he had once visited the set of the 1966 Batman TV series as a child, and had just returned from Africa where he had visited an actual bat cave, and thought being offered the role was a sign from the universe. So he signed on without reading the script or meeting with Schumacher. Like I said, he may have been kind of a weirdo.

With Kilmer now onboard, Rene Russo was dropped as the love interest, because she was considered too old (She would have been about 40 when the movie was made, and Kilmer would have been around 35. She still looks damn good at 71, so I don’t doubt she could have pulled it off.) Nicole Kidman was then cast in the role of Chase Meridian, and Tommy Lee Jones was brought in to play Two-Face (although Billy Dee Williams had played Harvey Dent in the original Burton Batman, hoping to one day play the character. Sorry, Billy. Warner still had to buy out his contract, so at least he got some free money for it.)

Things kind of went awry when Jim Carrey was cast as The Riddler, and given an obscene amount of money at the time (Well, I guess $20 million is pretty obscene for any time.) I can’t argue with their logic, of course, because in the mid-90’s, putting Jim Carrey in your movie was going to lead to big box office. However, it also leads to other things, like maybe your villain out-shining your hero. That was not so unusual, as even in Burton’s Batman, Jack Nicholson got top billing over Michael Keaton. But Carrey’s performance was even more over-the-top than Nicholson’s, and that’s saying something. And I realize that villains have to be ramped up in comic book movies, but my instincts tell me that Carrey was given a little more leeway than his fellow castmates to improvise a lot of his dialogue. In most of his scenes, Carrey wasn’t really playing The Riddler. He was pretty much playing Ace Ventura in a green unitard.

Tommy Lee Jones, meanwhile, was pretty much just earning a paycheck. And rumor has it that Jones actually hated Carrey, even telling him so when the two ran into each other at a restaurant during shooting. When Carrey asked why, Jones responded, “I cannot sanction your buffoonery.” I can’t say I disagree with Tommy on that one.

Despite all that, part of me is willing to give those guys a pass because it’s not like they had great material to work with. The script, as scripts often do, went through some changes throughout the film’s development. Originally, the plan was to focus on Batman’s duality. He’s not just Bruce Wayne with a mask, but he actually becomes Batman when he dons the cowl, which would have been cool when he came into conflict with Two-Face. However, Two-Face was mostly just the Joker with a coin, and Batman’s duality was only briefly mentioned in Bruce Wayne’s therapy sessions with Chase. Also, part of Edward Nygma’s motivation was supposed to be about Bruce Wayne shooting down his goofy mind-reading TV idea, and it seemed at times there was supposed to be some professional jealousy going on because Wayne was rich. There was the one scene where Nygma was revealing his product to the masses, and he actually dressed like Bruce Wayne, even going so far as to ask if his mole was on right. However, once again, all of that was forgotten once Carrey turned his wackiness up to eleven.

But when Carrey and Jones aren’t in a scene (chewing it), Kilmer and the movie itself are actually quite good. His interactions with Chase as both Bruce and Batman are funny and believable. Even Batman’s “Chicks dig the car” line is delivered well enough that it stops just short of being silly. And the addition of Robin to give Batman fits works well at first, despite the fact that Chris O’Donnell was in his mid-20’s at the time and probably didn’t really need to be taken care of. But it’s fine. Robin is pretty lame no matter who is playing Batman.

There are a few elements of the Year One draft of the script left in here. Young Bruce falling into what would one day become the Batcave is taken from those pages. Also, when Bruce and Chase meet for a therapy session, he sees her Batman research spread out on her desk and asks about it. She tells him that she finds him “fascinating, clinically.” She supposedly wonders what makes a man do this, but clearly there is something more to her interest than purely professional. Bruce is about to rock her world and tell her that he is Batman when he is interrupted by a call from Alfred. It is a fun callback to the 1989 Batman when Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne was about to tell Vicky Vale that he was Batman. Later in Batman Forever, when Chase invites Batman to her place for a late night booty call, before anything can happen she tells him that she can’t move forward with this tryst because she is in love with someone else. Batman says he understands and turns to leave. He then smiles to himself, knowing that the someone else is actually him.

Although it would have been a real kick in the codpiece if it turned out to be The Riddler.

But truly this is the Batman that fans enjoy: a Dark Knight who has to juggle his separate lives, bearing the guilt of his parents’ murder, beating criminals to a pulp to avenge them, while also trying to maintain a life as Bruce Wayne. But in some respects, has Bruce Wayne become the charade, as Clark Kent is merely the guise that Superman wears to fit in? Does Bruce Wayne even matter anymore? Certainly, when it comes to making time with Chase Meridian, he does. Even the name “Meridian” was meant to indicate a point between two poles. Bruce clearly wants Chase to like him for who he is, not because he’s Batman, so he decides to give up the mantle so he can be with her. And who can blame him? It’s freakini’ Nicole Kidman!

Like everything else in this movie, Riddler and Two-Face ruin everything. They kidnap her and destroy the Batcave, forcing Batman to don the cliched “untested” Batsuit with the SONAR modifications, just so they can sell one more toy. Batman then decides to team up with a newly-christened Robin, which he staunchly refused to do about fifteen minutes earlier, to take down the bad guys because “two against one are better odds.” And I guess he was right because they take them down quite easily, actually beating Two-Face by throwing more coins in the air when he tries his tired coin-flip gimmick, which is so confounding that he falls while trying to catch them and dies, kind of taking the pleasure of revenge away from Robin, but that’s fine, I guess. They always say revenge just leads to more killing in these movies, but Batman seems to be doing pretty well, and didn’t he kill The Joker in the ‘89 version?

Maybe this whole movie is just playing off the duality motif. There are some parts that are pretty fun and keep with the Batman theme. As I said, Kilmer is actually a great Bruce Wayne, right up there with Keaton and Bale, and definitely better than Clooney and Pattinson (maybe even slightly better than West!). But Carrey and Jones are just annoyingly over-the-top. Batman Forever definitely is way better than the follow-up, Batman & Robin, which was so bad that Kilmer took one look at the script and decided to do The Saint instead. He may have been a weirdo, but he was right about that one.

As big a fan as I am of Batman and Kilmer, I can’t really recommend Batman Forever, but I also won’t say to stay away from it. Maybe just flip a coin if you are trying to figure out if you should watch it or not. Either way, I am sad that Val Kilmer has passed on, but he left behind a great legacy of work that we can all still enjoy.

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