After the massive success of 1989’s Batman, Warner Bros were keen to exploit the license further with a sequel. Just one small problem – Tim Burton had no real interest in returning to direct one. With Burton’s signature style having been one of the key elements of the success of the original, the studio ended up conceding a lot more creative control to the kooky director to get him on board. Keaton also returned for the title role with an increased salary and in a move that seemed to be becoming a pattern for the series, female lead Catwoman was recast late in the day as original choice Annette Bening fell pregnant shortly before shooting began. With various re-writes (including an uncredited one just before filming commenced), could the sequel defy all the odds and better the original?

Wealthy industrialist Max Shreck has big plans for a new power station in Gotham, but all is not as it seems. Blocked by the Mayor and spurned by potential investor Bruce Wayne, Shreck allies himself with the deformed Oswald Cobblepot aka ‘The Penguin’ in a plot to oust the Mayor and replace him with Penguin himself. Unfortunately for Max, Batman isn’t the only thorn in his side after his attempt at murdering his long-suffering secretary Selina Kyle instead produces another deadly opponent – femme fatale Catwoman.

Batman Returns is a beloved film. Most of that, one suspects, is down to the iconic performance of Michelle Pfeiffer as perennial Batman frenemy Catwoman, and to a lesser extent Danny DeVito’s turn as Oswald Cobblepot/the Penguin. For me, it was never a film that I had felt particularly excited about – I didn’t enjoy it as much as the original, finding it a bit sillier and a lot messier. On this re-watch, I was struck by a great many things, not the least of which is that whereas this film isn’t great (and I’m sorry, all those fans who insist it’s the stronger of the Keaton entries, but I can’t agree), it has so much potential, and showcases a director who understands at least one fundamental truth about the character of Batman better than perhaps any other director who’s had a go at him before or since: that Batman isn’t very interesting.

To clarify – the story of Bruce Wayne’s creation of an alter ego vigilante in the wake of the murder of his parents before his eyes when he was a young boy is an interesting story. How a man who could want for nothing, who could go and do and be anything he wanted, came to dress up in a costume and prowl the crime-ridden streets of his city, righting wrongs and bringing justice to a place where it’s in short supply is a fascinating journey. And that’s the journey we took in 1989’s Batman. We saw his memory of that fateful night, we found out who’s created him, we saw him create a monster of his own in the Joker, and we saw their confrontation, its conclusion and his acceptance of the duality of his nature to the extent that he was willing to share that duality with another and have a relationship with her. Beyond that, it’s just a man dressing up and beating up more bad guys. Consider also that if – in some fictional future – Batman were to achieve his goal of making Gotham a crime-free place, Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego would have no further purpose.

It’s an oft-repeated trope that Batman’s villains are what make his stories interesting. Burton – who prior to directing Batman had never read any comics – gets that, and so in this sequel, stripped of Batman’s arch nemesis (having killed him off in the previous movie), he gives us two others, equally as damaged, equally as larger than life and eccentric, and he chooses to focus on them. I’m deadly serious – for a while on this re-watch I was wondering why there was so little screen time for Keaton, an actor I’ve always loved and no more so than in his turn as the caped crusader. But then it clicked – this isn’t a film that’s about Batman, because his story has already been told. This is a story about other monsters, and how they arise in a world where Batman is a thing.

Going even deeper, if we ignore the messiness of the narrative the script gives us and go to the themes, this is a film about who the real monsters are. Specifically, about how the real monsters are the ordinary looking men in suits. The Penguin here is undoubtedly an awful person, taking pleasure in the pain of others and willing to kill to make his point. But he’s also never really been given much choice by life. Thrown out by his parents as a baby for his deformities, he’s spent his life surviving in the seedy underworld of Gotham, literally living in the sewers and tunnels beneath the city. He’s an obvious freak of a vaudevillian type, but it’s difficult to see how – given his treatment by everyone from his parents onward – he could have been anything else. Selina Kyle is a put-upon assistant who’s mistreated by her boss, let down by every man in her life and harangued by her mother. She’s the very essence of downtrodden, and when her boss actually tries to murder her (whether he does or not is up for debate, the film wisely not spending too much time thinking on it) she flips and becomes a character who rages against everything that’s kept her down her entire life.

The real monster here is Max Shreck. A wealthy industrialist with a megalomaniacal plan to construct a ‘power station’ that’s actually a power capacitor, designed to suck up Gotham’s power surplus and hold the city to ransom. Shreck is willing to kill to protect this secret and is also willing to replace Gotham’s mayor with the Penguin to ensure that he gets the plans through. He’s ruthless, evil and hiding in plain sight (the movie introduces him as ‘Gotham’s Santa’) and the message of the movie couldn’t be clearer: never mind the obvious monsters you can easily see – look for the real monsters hiding among us, because they are the really terrible ones. It’s a bold direction for a property like Batman, which traditionally focuses more on the sort of traditional monsters and bad guys that can easily be seen (and beaten up) and tends to largely ignore the idea of ‘white collar crime’, but unfortunately it seems that among those endless rewrites, someone saw it as too bold, and decided that the more traditional monsters needed more screen time.

What that means is that we end up with a plot involving three antagonists who honestly shouldn’t ever end up working together. The Penguin hates Shreck because he’s spent years living in the sewers surrounded by the toxic waste Shreck dumps into the city, yet he agrees to work with him when Shreck offers to help make him Mayor. The two concoct a plan whereby the Mayor’s son will be kidnapped and then rescued by the Penguin, yet surely this could have been simply set up with any random child or even with an accomplice? Catwoman and Penguin decided to work together to stop Batman, but why? Catwoman’s main issue is with Shreck and the Patriarchy. She’s crossed with Batman, sure, but why work with a man who’s publicly best friends with her mortal enemy – the man who literally tried to kill her and created her new alter ego in the process? It all rather smashes together unsatisfactorily, dropping elements as and when they become narratively inconvenient, and leaves the viewer with nothing but the spectacular visuals and Danny Elfman’s haunting score to cling to.

Make no mistake, the visuals are stunning. Aesthetically it is a beautiful film on every level. The costumes, from the redesigned Batsuit to the terrifying Penguin costume (apparently DeVito was beside himself with sadness because children who saw him in costume were terrified) and of course, Pfeiffer’s eye-catching home-made latex catsuit, are all iconic pieces. In set design, the landscape of Gotham is more visible with much more of the movie than last time taking place in daylight, giving the opportunity for some real impression to be made with architecture. The repeated statues in a sort of faux Greco-Roman style would go on to be echoed in the following films as a key part of the Gotham skyline, and the dank lair of the Penguin is as grim as the man himself.

Tone is one area where the film suffers. It’s not so much that the oft-quoted darkness of the thing is wrong, as it jars with certain other parts of the film. DeVito’s Penguin is a horrific looking monster, but spends most of the film making cheap puns even when killing people. The issue is that the film never really seems to settle on what it wants Oswald Cobblepot to be: on one hand there’s that vein of sympathy it seems to be hinting at with the awful story of his abandonment and his shunning from society, but on the other he’s just so fundamentally unlikable – when he isn’t killing or terrorising people he’s sleazily trying his luck with any woman in reach, Catwoman included.

Then there’s Kyle herself, who the film never really seems to be too decided on. Is she actually resurrected and now possessing nine lives, or is that belief just part of a wider psychosis induced by the trauma of a near-death experience? And exactly whose side is she on? One minute she wants to kill Batman, the next she’s rather taken with him. One moment she’s dead set on avenging herself on Max, the next she’s joining forces with a man sponsored directly by him. It isn’t that either of these performances isn’t good – they genuinely are and are worth every bit of praise heaped on them – but more that the script just isn’t up to accommodating them all, ending up settling on just jamming them together in a succession of scenes any which way.

One persistent rumour at the time claimed that Keaton would leave after this film because he was fed up of being upstaged by his villainous co-stars. Keaton himself claims that he simply didn’t like the script for the proposed third Batman film, but it’s easy to see where the first rumour got started given how little Keaton gets to do here. Once again it feels like a good concept buried by muddled writing – Batman framed as a villain should not only not be too much of a stretch, but should absolutely work. It is after all practically a feature of the character as a whole. Here though, it’s wasted. Additionally, the whole concept as discussed earlier of pushing Batman to the background to let the villains provide the interest is a sound one and one the comics and other movies have used to great effect. Here, it’s wasted because the script doesn’t commit to the central monsters theory and instead just keeps splashing DeVito and Pfeiffer all over the screen with Walken left to occasionally saunter on and chew some scenery as you sit there and think ‘Oh yeah, that guy’s in this too.’

Whereas 1989’s Batman felt grounded, in a sort of noirish way, Batman Returns feels as if it is playing with supernatural and fantastical elements without ever really committing to them either. Catwoman’s status is left somewhat blank, Penguin’s specific ailments are murky, and his army of trained and obedient penguins is never even mentioned, just presented as a fait accompli by a script that gives you no reason to trust it.

If there’s a theme to Batman Returns then, it’s that it has a script that throws so many disparate ideas at the screen that not one of them sticks or has any depth. It’s eye candy in the purest sense, trying to fool you into thinking it’s a grander film than it is by letting the central performers run riot and hoping that the audience won’t pick up on the complete lack of substantive or coherent narrative. For years, I wondered why I preferred the predecessor to this sequel. Now, I finally have my answer, and it turns out it doesn’t take the World’s Greatest Detective to get there.