Screen:

...There's no there there...

...The earlier Batman movies, di-rected by Tim Burton, were heavy metal night-mares, dominated by their villains, full of ghastly jokes and haunting images...

...You might as well come to terms with the unavoidables...

...Was she simply kindhearted or was she prompted by her shrewd father, who was wary of warfare with the technologically advanced whites...

...Oh yes, most kids will love it...

...The best verbal exchange is the one you've heard in the fast food commercial- "I'll get drivethrough"-and that's in the first scene...

...Since Disney's Pocahontas is clearly in love with Smith, surely she needs no other motivation to save him...

...But they haven't...

...Remember the obnoxious class clown in eighth grade...

...And there is a delightful moment (perhaps the best in the movie) when Wiggins, the daffy hairstylist-manservant of the villainous colonial governor, in an excess of designing fury, turns a sizable part of the forest primeval into topiary...

...Tourists would drive by, and from their car radios wafting up to his God-dedicated ears would come the strains of "Colors of the Wind...

...Here, the drawing isn't bad, and it was probably a good idea (given the script's fabricated love story) to make the heroine as athletically fetching as Carmen de Lavallade in her prime...

...But though the filmmakers have been strenuous in their efforts at political correctness, they have been undone by their own provincialism...

...So that's why Pocahontas saves John Smith-to realize her dreams and, by doing that, to realize herself...

...All this recycling wouldn't matter if the filmmakers had carried over the comic and pictorial inventiveness of the last four Disney animated features as well as the plot strategies...

...As is the entire movie...

...To this tale of two cultures discovering each other, the filmmakers have brought no sense of discovery but only a compulsion to confirm current secular pieties and box-office-tested formulas...

...Yet, to pump up suspense, our heroine must wander off into the forest and wonder what to do while her lover is being led to the block, and only when the great tree spirit Mother Willow (gag...

...In fact, self-realization becomes the keynote of her character, not tribal honor or human love or nature-mysticism...

...But, as Maurice Sendak has bluntly put it, kids have no taste...

...But most of Pocahontas''s animation is simply a matter of copying reality, putting before us talking heads that might as well be live actors rather than drawings...

...The great joy of animation lies in its power of instant metaphor...

...RICHARD ALLEVA...

...If a sports writer refers to a ballplayer making it safe to first "by a hair," animation can show the athlete's moustache actually uncurling to touch the base (as in the Disney short, "The Mighty Casey...

...She'll probably be perfect as the icy murderess in the upcoming To Die For...

...Instead, he's a brain burglar with a gadget that taps into minds, and nothing significant is done with that...

...It's no use trying to ignore Pocahontas or Batman Forever...

...And yes, it is a mighty catchy tune...

...How does one discuss Batman Forever...

...But the animator can actually turn the gossips into geese and back again with lightning speed and the swiftness mitigates the cliche Pocahontas sometimes partakes of this magic, as when the princess sees the sails of John Smith's ship as very strange clouds and the Disney artists show us just why she makes the mistake...

...Carrey is the only performer here who grabs your attention, but he only grabs, he doesn't charm...

...While the princess communes with nature, she sings about her need for self-realization...

...The co-villain, Two-Face, is meant to be a Jekyll-Hyde, but no matter which side of his face you're looking at, he's just Hyde...

...These heroes have been essentially ignored by their own creators...

...There is still a war on drugs, isn't there...

...Sexual warmth is not her bag...

...This wrecks the climax, the famous rescue of Smith from execution...

...Their motto seems to have been: Don't tell the kids anything they don't already know...

...How about a stylite perched upon a pillar in the middle of the desert...

...That's the trouble with dumbing down...

...What motivated the real Pocahontas remains a mystery...

...Driven to desperation by the stupidity of the script, the usually fine Tommy Lee Jones only snarls and howls...

...reminds her that the needle of Smith's compass resembles the arrow that has haunted the heroine's dreams, does Pocahontas sprint into action...

...But Kilmer is pallid to the point of invisibility in the Bruce Wayne scenes, and once he suits up as the Bat...well, anybody with height and good posture looks adequately weird and commanding in body armor...

...To be sure, American Natives did set great store by their dreams, but the filmmakers haven't made their heroine's climactic decision a matter of tradition but an inspiration of sheer egotism...

...Cabbies discuss the box office grosses of the monster megahits the way they used to analyze the final innings of baseball games, and politicians will, doubtless, soon enlist the su-perheroes in the war on drugs...

...This entree, produced by Burton but directed by Joel Schumacher, isn't dominated by anything except the kind of technology that blows up everything in sight and you get sick of that before the movie is ten minutes old...

...And while the human characters encounter each other, their animal sidekicks do the usual critter shtick that is supposed to steal the show...

...Yes, Barbra Streisand will cut her own single and win a Grammy...

...But the worst failure is the title character...

...Jim Carrey is that clown writ large...

...No matter how stupid a movie you've made, there's always something dumber at the other end of the lobby...

...The heroine is Ariel ooppertoned and endowed with Olympic-class legs instead of a fishtail...

...Lo, they turn out to have been avoidable after all...

...They didn't completely cohere-Tim Burton films never do-but they fascinated...

...Alan Menken, tunemaker of the last few Disney films (except Lion King) has here put all his undeniable talent into one song, "Colors of the Wind" (nausea-inducing lyrics by Stephen Schwartz...

...Pocahontas, meet Shirley MacLaine...

...But it's the villains who disappoint the most, for it is the villains who must provide the themes of Batman stories...

...For King Triton we have Chief Powhatan, and there is the usual villain (Jamestown governor) whose defeat by the forces of goodness reconciles the heroine's father to her suitor...

...Chris O'Donnell, a usually charming juvenile, is repellent as Robin, all adolescent barking with nothing underpinning the noise...

...Jack Nicholson's Joker personified hatred of beauty and normality, and Michelle Pfeiffer' s Catwoman mocked yet glamorized feminist rage...

...Perhaps it was you...

...But Jim Carrey's Riddler does nothing interesting with the idea of brain-teasing...

...Yes, it will be on the radio for the next four months...

...For Pocahontas isn't about the seventeenth-century Indian princess, and Batman Forever isn't about anything...

...Pocahontas is the better picture, for the Disney craftsmen are too professional to ignore altogether the demands of plot, characterization, and visualization...

...And when you do...

...And just as the mermaid longed for the handsome mortal, Pocahontas cherished the European dreamboat, John Smith, no grizzled Elizabethan freebooter here but just another Disney idealization of a high school jock...

...The monastery's computer might break down and a repair person would show up wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the face of the Caped Crusader...

...For what is Disney's Pocahontas but Disney's Little Mermaid retreaded...

...And Nicole Kidman-so beautiful and so profoundly unlik-able-curdles the love scenes...

...Val Kilmer should have been a compelling superhero since he is a fine, classically trained actor and such are good at swashbuckling stuff {see, Daniel Day-Lewis in Last of the Mohicans and Liam Neeson in Rob Roy), having a sense of bodily line, commanding voices, and the ability to suggest martial prowess...

...The characters are the blandest Disney has given us since Cinderella...

...At the multiplex I went to, one week after Batman Forever's opening, very few people were lining up to see it, but there was a mob going into Power Rangers...

...Powhatan and the other natives have been carefully drafted to avoid racial insult, but their characterizations are hewed from cigar-store wood...

...But the rest of the songs are depressingly derivative and forgettable...

...The unavoidables turn out to be orphans...

...The Englishmen are all dolts, and the villainous governor isn't a patch on the sea witch in Little Mermaid...

...Yes, it will win the Academy Award...

...Yet the movie is, at its core, quite dead...

...If a live-action director wants to compare gossiping women to cackling geese, he cuts from a shot of gossips to a shot of geese and the effect is pretty plodding...

...Their protagonists advertise fast food on TV and, in turn, our children advertise the movies by brandishing Pocahontas plastic cups and Batman figurines collected from those fast food joints...