Celluloid Heroes

A kiss can be even deadlier if you mean it.

Following the huge success of Tim Burton’s Batman, a sequel was inevitable. It’s also clear that Burton was allowed a lot more creative leeway in directing Batman Returns than he had on the first film. The 1989 film had scattered touches of the director’s off-center worldview, but the 1992 sequel was set in a world that was Burton-esque from wall to wall.

To try to top Jack Nicholson’s balls-to-the-wall portrayal of the Joker, Returns gives us three, count ‘em, three villains for our movie-going bucks. The Penguin (Danny DeVito), Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Max Shreck (Christopher Walken). You would think with this kind of A-List talent on hand, however, that Batman Returns would bat better than .333 in the villain department. Of the three, only Catwoman manages to emerge as a full-blooded character.

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Oh, no. Not again.

Spaceballs marked the beginning of a second stage to Mel Brooks‘ career. After a busy decade in the 1970s, he had been quiet since 1981’s History of the World, Part I. Unlike his early films, where he satirized broad genres or at least the entire life’s work of a single director, this second wind would find him targeting a single film for parody and, in this case, a full decade after the film in question, Star Wars, was current and considered ripe for the spoofing.

The real weakness of this and later Brooks films is the laziness of the humor. Brooks seems to be weakly emulating the style of Abraham/Zucker films that his early work helped to inspire, such as Airplane! The humor is a scattershot collection of set-ups and punch lines that often seems obvious and labored. Jabba the Hutt is now called Pizza the Hutt. Har har. Yoda is now Yogurt. Stop it, you’re killing me. It’s painful that the man behind Blazing Saddles is resorting to gags that seem more appropriate to CRACKED magazine.

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