Forget 'Joker: Folie à Deux' and 'The Penguin': Make Gotham City Campy Again

Look up to the heavens: in a climate of endless superhero IP, with studios plumbing the depths of comic book lore while remixing and reviving the old standbys, the Bat signal is still shining brightest across all of Hollywood. We’re two years removed from the last proper Batman adventure and still two years out from the next one, and even still, the Caped Crusader’s grip on the game remains tight. From Max to the multiplex, the Bat is alive—but the material could not be more boring.

Batman movies, as a genre, are constantly being relitigated. The Batman inspired some impressed [read: delusional] fans to ride for it above Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, which was previously the untouchable standard, except for The Dark Knight Rises—a movie that people are starting to embrace as overhated. I’ve seen a growing sentiment that Batman Begins is actually the real jewel in that series, ahead of obvious pick The Dark Knight. And those of us with taste recognize Tim Burton’s Batman Returns as possibly the single greatest live-action Bat-adventure committed to film.

Moreover, the idea of what kind of Batman we want, deserve, or need right now is always in conversation. It’s been almost twenty years since Nolan wiped away the bad aftertaste of Joel Schumacher’s bubblegum pop with Begins—and two long decades of comic book movies trying (and mostly failing) to recapture that capital-G gritty mold. So much so that the so-called realism of Batman Begins now feels quaint. Zack Snyder and Ben Affleck went full Frank Miller, depicting Batman as a full-on sociopath who branded criminals and proudly brandished machine guns on the Batmobile, an era that was blessedly truncated. But Matt Reeves’ heralded 2022 take is just a different shade of “dark”—a noir murder mystery taking cues from the Fincher oeuvre and Chinatown.

And that path, tacking away from even trace elements of fantasy, is how you get to where we are right now: A new Joker sequel in theaters (where the Clown Prince of Crime is once again depicted as merely a mentally ill loser who isn’t really like that, and is seemingly sexually assaulted in prison to hammer that point home) and HBO’s The Penguin (where the titular rogue is an underworld social climber and would-be Tony Soprano) ruling TV’s most prestigious night. The “grounded” approach to DC’s superhero characters that felt so exciting in 2005 has become an unpleasant, joyless norm. That may change under the stewardship of James Gunn, who’s been built up as the great unifier DC’s historically chaotic film and TV division needs—but for the moment, between Joker’s gratuitous abuse and Penguin’s triple-cross plotting, it feels more like Sons of Anarchy’s Kurt Sutter is driving the bus.

It’s enough to make someone wistfully look back on Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones both going for gold at the Ham Olympics in 1995’s Batman Forever, a superhero film that found a whimsical happy medium between seriousness and satire. Even Schumacher eventually took it too far with 1997’s Batman & Robin, but these days, it really feels like his alchemy was underrated on his first go-round: Batman Forever has the best mix of tones, mingling the character’s campy Adam West live-action roots and Tim Burton’s gothic aesthetics, with stakes real enough to satiate actual adults. This is still a movie where Two-Face sends an entire family plummeting to their death as the whole city watches in horror, and one of our heroes contemplates cold-blooded revenge. Nicole Kidman’s voice register alone is enough to test the boundaries of a PG-13 rating. Kindly old Alfred gets clocked in a raid on Wayne Manor. And there’s a real sense of flair and artfulness to the action set pieces.