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The title, at first glance, comes off like a generic mega production placeholder (much like the meaningless Batman Forever) but perhaps there is more than a little dark humor here as well. Batman/Bruce Wayne barely figures into the first 30 minutes of the plot. Indeed, the storyline seems to be doing all it can to keep him at bay, and when he is onscreen, his character isn't allowed to evolve from the first time around. As Batman Begins proved, there is a mother lode of psychological insight to be picked at as far as Bruce Wayne is concerned. What the series continually does, however, is stack Batman up against villains so over-the-top (justifiably and otherwise) or realized so perfectly by their creators that Batman becomes overshadowed. Setting him off against more than one antagonist also overpowers his character. Overstuffing villains in sequels, particularly superhero sagas, is a recurring practice that continues to mystify me. In the case of Batman Returns, The Penguin/Oswald Cobblepot, Selina Kyle/Catwoman and Max Schreck/Christopher Walken all have to be introduced and set up before the story can proceed and even after that point, the way the narrative haphazardly wends itself requires keeping one or two of them off-screen for large chunks of time.

Burton's continual placement of the oddball or outcast at the center of his story usually works, but here there is a hierarchy of relative evil that requires some serious displacement of an audience's emotion. The Penguin is an unloved child grown up to seek vengeance against society at large (since his parents are dead and no longer a target for his bitterness) but Burton and Waters obviously see him as tragic. There is also a very inside joke given that the father, glimpsed briefly at the film's opening, is played by an almost unrecognizable Paul Reubens, who knows a thing or two about alter egos with arrested development issues. Catwoman is posited as a vigilante alternative to Batman, someone to right wrongs (saving a woman at one point from a would-be assailant, she rejects the victim's thank you with a sneer) but who gets off on her leather garb. I am never sure what to make of the transformation scene where Selina dies and then is "reborn" with the aid of some carnivorous kitties. The makeup and altered acting style of Pfeiffer seem to suggest "zombie but hotter and with more sexual confidence." Unlike Bruce Wayne's donning of his mask to become Batman, it seems as if Selina would be just as happy - and not much different - with or without her costume.

Then, there is the issue of Schreck, who Walken plays as an immensely likeable (though homicidal and power-crazed, certainly) businessman with some interesting ideas about how to run a corporation. He is the only one who seems evil in the traditional sense, but not much is really made of what he hopes to accomplish with the power plant he wants to build. Walken's portrayal of Schreck is entertaining, in the way that a lot of Walken's performances are and when he is off the screen in the second half, there is a certain lagging of energy. What really brings the story to a halt in the climax is how Burton and Waters succumb to a ridiculous act of revenge on The Penguin's part - penguins armed with missiles, how...odd - and then allow it to deteriorate further with pointless explosions and things getting blowed up real good. Not exactly what I go to a Tim Burton to experience, satiric intent or not.

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