Burton’s controversial gothic gloom is gone, with nothing to replace it Schumacher has overcorrected and made Batman too light. Pinch-hitting for Burton, Joel Schumacher ( Falling Down, The Client) tries to make Batman Forever a shoot-the-works bash, a deliberate departure from Batman Returns, which many found “too dark.” But if this director has a personality, it hasn’t snuck into any of his movies. Despite its stabs at hipness, it’s the campy no-brainer we were afraid the 1989 movie would be. The new Batman Forever dispenses with all that bothersome complexity. Burton and Keaton’s Batman movies are really about two misfits trying to make sense of the all-time misfit: a man preserving peace through violence, upholding the law by breaking it.

Even in 1989, Keaton knew he was too old to run around in a cape, and he gave Batman the weight of uncertainty.

(Burton and his screenwriters took a page from Frank Miller’s 1986 revival Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.) And Michael Keaton, feeling a bit removed from this strange hero (but relating to his intensity), embodied Burton’s depressed ambivalence: you saw it in the way he held his body - stiff and pinched, even when he wasn’t in costume.

Committed to a huge project he didn’t initiate, Burton showed no interest in the catharsis of crime-fighting his Batman was a loner haunted by the random murder of his parents, doomed to keep playing the event in his head, sworn to protect the innocents of Gotham from the horror that shattered his life. The key to the first two Batman movies - 1989’s Batman and 1992’s Batman Returns, both directed by Tim Burton - was their gloomy ambivalence about the hero.

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