‘Batman Forever’: the most cursed superhero movie ever
Any superhero movie will require a minor miracle to get right from top to bottom. As evidenced by some of the more spectacular failures of the genre, the greatest material to work with often gets overshadowed by the little details, with performances not being what they should be or CGI effects that weren’t quite ready for primetime when they eventually hit the theatre. Although most Batman movies proved to be an extravagant experience, Batman Forever remained one of the most chaotic filming experiences of its time.
Before the boom of Batman material in the 1990s, Tim Burton brought ‘The Caped Crusader’ to the big screen in his 1989 adaptation. Blending the camp aspect of the character with his traditional brand of darkness, Burton would ultimately be let go when it was time to work on the sequel to his second film, Batman Returns.
Looking to get some fresh blood into the director’s chair, the studio eventually went with Joel Schumacher, then known for working on productions like Lost Boys. Even though Schumacher had seen the Burton films, he thought that the movie should be about bringing Batman back to the roots of the character on television.
Casting Val Kilmer in the lead role after Michael Keaton refused to come back, Schumacher’s first turn behind the camera also introduced Chris O’Donnell as Robin, as he and Batman face off against Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face and Jim Carrey’s take on The Riddler. Even though everyone seemed to have high hopes for it initially, things started to go haywire with Tommy Lee Jones.
Not thinking that he wanted to make anything too over-the-top, Jones was critical of Carrey’s performance at first. During production, Carrey even remembered Jones pulling him aside to tell him that he couldn’t the kind of buffoonery that he was bringing to the quizzical villain. That kind of holier-than-thou also applied to the director as well.
When talking about his experience working on the project, Schumacher told The Independent that he thought Jones was “an asshole”, saying: “I’m tired of defending overpaid, overprivileged actors. I pray I don’t work with them again”. Despite his mandates for what he wanted out of the cast and crew, Jones’ approach to Two-Face is easily one of the campiest parts of the film.
Despite not wanting to tolerate joking around, Jones’ way of inhabiting the split personality of Harvey Dent is one of the most comical parts of the movie, even coming close to chewing the scenery more than Carrey at some points. Then again, the villains weren’t the only ones that Schumacher had a problem with.
Though Kilmer had absorbed the character of Bruce Wayne, his attention to detail eventually got to the director, explaining, “He was badly behaved, he was rude and inappropriate. Then we had two weeks where he did not speak to me, but it was bliss”. That kind of behaviour ultimately got Kilmer booted from the sequel, instead casting George Clooney to bring ‘The Bat’ to life for Batman and Robin, which would be seen as a creative low point by the fanbase.
Despite the lacklustre reputation of Schumacher’s superhero films, the backlash to those films helped lay the groundwork for the next version of Batman, with Christopher Nolan taking the reins to create a respectably gritty approach to the character with his trilogy in the 2000s. While Schumacher may have worked to create the vision of Batman that he had in his head, the amount of creative hangups he had to plough made some of the scenes verge on a parody of what the superhero stood for.
