Val Kilmer in ‘Batman Forever’ Was a True 1990s Moment
Posted on: Apr 02, 2025 23:12 IST | Posted by: Nytimes
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The actor took only one turn in the famous batsuit. That film, “Batman Forever,” couldn’t be a more representative artifact of its era.
In June 1995 a pop confection hit thousands of movie screens. It seemed to embody what both boosters and critics have identified as that decade’s end-of-history nonchalance. It was, of all things, a Batman movie. And holding it together, the sturdy straight man surrounded by abject goofiness, was Val Kilmer, the actor who died at the age of 65 on Tuesday.
“Batman Forever” was the third movie in a franchise kicked off in 1989 by the director Tim Burton’s brooding “Batman.” Starring Michael Keaton in the title role and Jack Nicholson as the Joker, “Batman” was, by the standards of the time, dark for a comic-book flick.
Burton’s and Keaton’s follow-up, “Batman Returns” (1992), failed to repeat the original’s box-office success. So a new director, Joel Schumacher, was brought in expressly to make what one journalist termed a “Batman Lite.” Schumacher was a fan of Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc Holliday in the 1993 western “Tombstone” and tapped him as his leading man.
This was not Burton’s Batman. “There’s not much to contemplate here,” the critic Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times, “beyond the spectacle of gimmicky props and the kitsch of good actors (all of whom have lately done better work elsewhere) dressed for a red-hot Halloween.”
Schumacher favored showy camera angles and a garish color scheme. The villains — Jim Carrey played the Riddler, Tommy Lee Jones was Two-Face — were freely permitted to chew the scenery. Batman’s suit had nipples. The movie was weird.
It was also a box-office smash. It broke an opening-weekend record and eventually brought in more than $336 million worldwide, besting its predecessor by tens of millions of dollars.
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