Screen

...For this plot dictates that Catwoman become a confederate of Penguin and her former employer (and near-murderer), the heinous Max Schreck, as they plot to destroy Batman...

...In this movie, Catwoman isn't merely a slinky temptress and amazon, she's a feminist fury...

...By contrast, Danny De Vito as Penguin is suppressed by his make-up and costume...

...All very kinky and amusing, but before the movie is half over, it becomes clear that Burton and Waters have failed to invent a plot that can contain the new meanings they are trying to invest in Catwoman...

...The clownwhite face, long nose, and twenty pounds of silicone layered onto his body certainly give De Vito the Penguin silhouette, but the actor can't penetrate the stuff emotionally...

...It was merely a conceit that allowed the first generation of graduate school film critics, starving on the junk food of American movies, to kid themselves into thinking that they had seen entertainment with a touch of profundity to it...

...She gives a scintillating performance...

...What does Catwoman wanflV...

...Michael Keaton could mutter darkly to Joker, "You created me," as he slugged it out with his nemesis at the climax, but this self-revelation did nothing to change the hero's nature or alter his destiny...

...What also helps is that, instead of trying to melt the iceberg Kim Bassinger, Keaton now gets to make love to, and fight with, Michelle Pfeiffer as Cat woman...

...Resurrected as Catwoman, Selina avenges not only her own wrongs but those of her entire sex...

...Surely it is the power hunger manifested by Penguin and Schreck that represents what Selina hates most about the world of male privilege, and not the lonely, power-rejecting, reclusive, woman-rescuing Batman...

...I laughed at the send-up of the Helen Reddy lyric and I was amused at the effort to turn Catwoman into both an archetype and a reductio ad absurdum of feminism...

...Or what does Dr...

...Criminal initiates Superhero, who, in turn, transforms Criminal into Archcriminal...

...Just as the crime-fighter was germinated when little Bruce Wayne witnessed the killing of his parents by a criminal, so the archfiend was created when that same murderer was dropped into a vat of acid by Batman...

...The noir photography isn't overdone this time...

...And Keaton now allows more of Batman's edginess to seep into Bruce Wayne so that, as the billionaire, Keaton no longer seems to be doing an impersonation of Jeff Goldblum...

...The sets and photography were obviously masterminded by someone familiar with Art Deco, German Expressionism in both cinema and painting, and the "graphic novels" of Frank Miller...

...In terms of sheer spectacle, there's a genuine improvement...

...Such gimmicks belong in a Batman movie...

...What else does any super-villain want...

...1 am Cat-woman...

...One might as well ask, what does Penguin want...

...No matter how complicated Catwoman is allowed to be, the bullets, the bombs, the whizzing Batmobile, the flying projectiles, the army of little penguins boobytrapped by their master with explosives and marched to destroy the metropolis, all these soon take over the movie...

...But the funny thing about Batman was that the putatively central dramatic idea simply wasn't explored by the script, only exploited for a little metaphysical frisson...

...And it was interesting, when Selina and Bruce Wayne fall in love, to watch two schizoid costume-freaks try to get together...

...What gripped the general audience were the fights, the explosions, the aerial stunts, the sly wit of Jack Nicholson's villainy, the bizarre violence (the rictus on the faces of the victims of Joker's poisonous cosmetics), and the endless parade of gadgets...

...If he isn't exactly a character yet, Keaton's Batman is at least a force to be reckoned with...

...Our palates Commonweal grow more jaded with each passing year, so Batman, like the Terminator films, the Alien series, and even the latest Spielberg films, tries to awaken us with little doses of Jungean imagery, apocryphal foreboding, broody psychology, hip sociology...

...Her daylight self, Selina, is a used and abused secretary to an evil tycoon (Christopher Walken, who manages to be magnetic even when he's totally miscast) who first patronizes her attempts to contribute to his business and then tries to murder her when she accidentally uncovers one of his corruptions...

...she hisses, "hear me roar...

...She has always seemed more wan than subtle...

...And she seethes at the very idea of female dependence...

...But Tim Burton, too proud and too talented to be satisfied with such simplicity, so complicates a comic book universe that such questions get raised...

...It's like hiring Orson Welles to play a mute...

...Michael Keaton's characterization has slightly improved...

...Why, they want to rule the world, of course...

...When will simple entertainment once again become content with its own simplicity...

...Batman Returns is better than Batman...

...Any number of actors can thin their lips and dart their eyes as well as Keaton does but at least this time he uses his body more expressively, employing sharp right angle moves as he turns from one catastrophe to another that suggest that Batman's singleminded dedication to crimefighting is turning him into an automaton...

...I've never been particularly taken by Pfeiffer...

...But it is the better villain, Catwoman, that truly reveals the echt-exsdXz nature of Tim Burton's enterprise...

...His vocal performance is so limited— wheezing punctuated by snarls—that he begins to bore only a few minutes after his first entrance...

...But here the very prepos-terousness of the role—the skintight suit, the acrobatics, the karate moves, the feline sexiness—seems to have liberated the actress...

...before backflipCommonweal ping away into the shadows...

...It still puzzles me that such a volatile, facially expressive actor is being used to play a masked man...

...Ah, the inextri-cability of Good and Evil...

...After dispatching a mugger, she then rounds furiously on the helpless female victim because the latter had screamed for Batman when attacked...

...Just as in the previous Batman where the interdependence of good and evil only spiced a conventional action movie without giving it substance, here the feminist reverberations set off by Catwoman only exist alongside the plot mechanics rather than transforming them...

...And why shouldn't they...

...Bo Welch's sets are as good as Anton Furst's but this time Burton really explores them with his camera...

...Nor was the script unsophisticated: Joker was presented as a mirror image of Batman...

...Or what does Lex Luthor want...

...In other words, what really worked in Batman were the same things that work in better James Bond movies, which have never had intellectual pretensions...

...So which is it...

...Feminist dilemmas do not...

...Or Professor Moriarty...

...But the James Bond movies no longer have the box office appeal they once enjoyed (only millions raked in instead of billions) and the most recent un-neurotic entertainment, Warren Beatty's sweet, wholesouled Dick Tracy, left some critics and audience yawning...

...the visuals are satiny rather than murky...

...RICHARD ALLEVA 14 August 1992: 29...

...This was pulp rewritten by Jung, the preliterate dipped into the subconscious...

...No reader of the Batman comic books would even pause to ask such a question nor would any viewer of the cheesy but entertaining T. V. series...

...And this romance, too, is used by Burton and scenarist Daniel Waters, to kid feminism and the war between the sexes: should Selina give into her tenderest "womanly" feelings or should she, as Catwoman, concentrate on wreaking havoc on male-dominated Western civilization...

...The very first frames of the first installment announced that the director wouldn't, perhaps couldn't be content to make enjoyable junk out of Bob Kane comic books...

...But why would she do this...

...What does Catwoman really want...

...Fu Manchu want...

...Or is it the case that her sexual longings so frighten her that Selina must try to destroy the Caped Crusader...

...Raised, they can't be answered or even seriously addressed...

...Danny Elfman's swooping, racing music isn't much different from his previous Batman score but, since this movie's look is more precise and the action better choreographed, the music seems more in accord with what we see and sight and sound now feed off each other more effectively...