Batman Forever Was as Bonkers as Jim Carrey at the Height of His Powers
Batman Forever and Batman & Robin were truly weird movies. Sandwiched between Tim Burton’s tormented Bruce Wayne and Christopher Nolan’s dark realism, Joel Schumacher’s mid-’90s Batman movies were stupidly silly affairs.
But sometimes, you love a movie deeply even though it’s stupid, perhaps even because it’s stupid. And that is exactly why we will be watching and loving Batman Forever … forever. At least that’s the case for the new Honest Trailers voice-over guy: “This is definitely the worst movie I’ve seen 30 times.”
There was almost too much weirdness in this movie for Screen Junkies to pack in. There were two Jim Carreys, each trying to outdo each other: The real Jim Carrey as the onesie-wearing Riddler, and Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face, who “makes the horrible choice to bring the same manic energy as Jim Carrey.” But it wasn’t just these intentionally wacky actors. Batman Forever featured a whole star-studded cast of weirdness: Val Kilmer’s emotionless Bruce Wayne, whose contribution to the Batman legacy was that his mouth was always open; Nicole Kidman’s incredibly thirsty Bat-girlfriend/Bat-therapist, drooling lustily over a rubber suit; Chris O’Donnell’s laundry-karate–doing Robin—“Holy dry clean–only Batman, this makes me want to drink some bleach!” And there was a subplot with a giant bat that was (unfortunately) cut.
Look, Batman Forever does have its redeeming qualities, admits the trailer, the most important being the thumbs up GIF it spawned. And at the end of the day, the fact is “it’s not as shitty as Batman & Robin.”