Movie Review: Chato's Land (1972)

Genre: Western  

Director: Michael Winner  

Starring: Charles Bronson, Jack Palance, James Whitmore, Richard Basehart  

Running Time: 100 minutes  

Synopsis: At a dusty town saloon, half-Apache Chato (Charles Bronson) kills the racist local sheriff in self defense. Former Confederate Captain Quincey Whitmore (Jack Palance) gathers up a posse of townfolks, local ranchers, and a Mexican tracker, and they set out to hunt down the fugitive. But in the rough and unforgiving terrain it soon becomes apparent that Chato has the upper hand, as divisions and disputes emerge between the posse members.

What Works Well: While the plot also works as a Vietnam War allegory, this is an essentially simple but uncompromising hunters-become-the-hunted Western. Writer Gerald Wilson fills the posse with bloodthirsty racists (with just a few circumspect voices), and most of the dialogue chips away at the group's unity towards disintegration. A remarkably fit Charles Bronson (at 50 years old) has a grand total of two sentences and eight words in English, but dominates proceedings like a shadow of doom descending over the posse's fate. As Captain Quincy, Jack Palance enjoys a thoughtful role lamenting battlefield losses and trying to maintain discipline among a ragtag group slow to understand that both Chato and his land are much more than they can handle.

What Does Not Work As Well: The production values are creaky, some repetitiveness sets in, and morally decrepit men don't make for good company.

Key Quote:

Chato: Back off, lawman.

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Movie Review: Tango & Cash (1989)

Genre: Buddy Action Comedy  

Director: Andrei Konchalovsky  

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Kurt Russell, Jack Palance, Teri Hatcher  

Running Time: 104 minutes  

Synopsis: In Los Angeles, Lieutenants Ray Tango (Sylvester Stallone) and Gabe Cash (Kurt Russell) are two highly effective cops working in different precincts. The sophisticated Tango makes his money on the stock market and wears three-piece suits, while Cash is more the scruffy cowboy type. Crime boss Perret (Jack Palance) decides that the two officers are causing too much damage to his business and frames them for murder. Tango and Cash end up in prison and have to plot an escape in order to clear their names, while Cash also finds time for a romance with Tango's sister Kiki (Teri Hatcher). 

What Works Well: Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell establish a quick rapport and easily bounce off each other in an enjoyable display of never-too-serious but still muscular buddy camaraderie. Stallone is happy to mock his screen persona, and a constant stream of jibes and zingers generates chuckles. The prison scenes carry the added sweaty threat of cops placed in the company of convicts.

What Does Not Work As Well: A non-existent plot attempts to survive by hibernating between action set-pieces. The villains are shortchanged, with Jack Palance wasted into delivering a few cartoonish monologues while coddling mice, leaving the bulk of the antagonist work to his chief henchman Requin (Brion James). Kiki is (of course) an exotic dancer, thereby justifying bump-and-grind scenery as a backdrop to an already unnecessary romantic side-quest. The climax is a mess of colliding hardware straight from the imagination of a five year old child playing with toy trucks, leading to limp final confrontations with the bad guys. 

Key Quote:

First police officer (shouting at Tango): I want your badge, I want your weapon, I want your ass, who the fuck do you think you are?

Second police officer: He thinks he's Rambo.

Tango: Rambo...is a pussy.

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Movie Review: Panic In The Streets (1950)

A crime drama and medical thriller, Panic In The Streets adds the threat of an epidemic and pointed character dynamics to a gritty on-location police investigation.

In New Orleans, a grungy poker game is interrupted when Kochak (Lewis Charles), a recent stowaway arrival in the city, feels sick and departs with his winnings. Gangster Blackie (Jack Palance) is not impressed: he shoots Kochak dead. The dumped body is found the next day, and after the coroner raises the alarm, Lieutenant Commander Clinton Reed (Richard Widmark) of the Public Health Service determines Kochak was suffering from the contagious and deadly pneumonic plague.

Reed teams up with police Captain Tom Warren (Paul Douglas) to trace the movements of the dead man and inoculate all who came in contact with him. They have 48 hours before an epidemic breaks out and the press release the story. The investigation leads to a port hiring hall, then a freighter, and finally a Greek restaurant. Blackie and his associates Fitch (Zero Mostel) and Poldi (Guy Thomajan) sense heightened police interest in their victim and conclude Kochak was hiding something important.

Filmed on location in New Orleans, Panic In The Streets finds director Elia Kazan delving into stark territory with hard-headed men engaged in uncompromising pursuits. The discovery of an unknown murder victim should barely warrant a mention in a city like New Orleans, but here the dead man becomes the critical victim zero of a potentially catastrophic epidemic, forcing doctor Reed and Captain Warren to begrudgingly work together.

The men are not natural allies, and the film benefits by underlining their contrasts. Reed is dogmatic about the impending crisis, pushing Warren into a skeptical and unimpressed mood. The script by Richard Murphy and Daniel Fuchs gives the conflict time and space to breathe, mutual respect growing slowly and in earned increments.

The film also expands into the home front. Clinton is feeling sorry for himself, stuck in a non-glamorous government job and insufficient income to pay the bills. His wife Nancy (Barbara Bel Geddes) frets about finances while longing for a second child to provide a sibling for their young son Tommy. But in the middle of the evolving crisis Nancy works up the courage to provide a crucial ego boost to her exhausted man, Bel Geddes shining in her designated moment.

The focus on characters helps the film overcome its obvious rough patches. Kazan has fun with sharp shadows and pointed contrasts in grimy locations, but is otherwise caught between a police procedural and a medical thriller. The plot often trips over itself trying to explain why the epidemic will hold off for 48 hours, and how finding Blackie as a crime perpetrator without tracing his contacts is somehow cause to proclaim the end of the crisis.

Richard Widmark adds a high level of intensity, his quick temper matched only by his rapid reach for a syringe to poke antidotes into everyone's arm. In his film debut, Jack Palance casts a tall shadow as a cold-blooded thug.

Despite a few questionable doses, Panic In The Streets wields a pointy needle.

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Movie Review: Flight To Tangier (1953)

A blundering action adventure, Flight To Tangier rumbles through the rigid turbulence of B-movie status despite a decent cast.

In Morocco, Tangier is an international city and a hub for unscrupulous activity. Black market pilot Hank Brady (John Pickard) is flying a single passenger with a briefcase full of money notes into the airport. Waiting for the flight are underworld criminals Danzer (Robert Douglas) and Goro (Marcel Dalio), who are in an uneasy partnership to trade in illegal weaponry. Also at the airport is Hank's buddy pilot Gil Walker (Jack Palance), who has a chequered military history, his girlfriend Nicki (Corinne Calvet), and mysterious American journalist Susan Lane (Joan Fontaine).

The plane crashes near the airport and is found to be empty, Hank and his passenger having bailed. Tangier police chief Colonel Weir (Jeff Morrow) starts to investigate, and Susan is revealed to be Hank's fiancee, while Nikki has divided loyalties. Soon Walker is accused of murder and forced to go on the run with Nicki and Susan, with the journalist having critical information about where Hank and the briefcase may be hiding. Danzer, Goro and their goons give chase, as do Weir's police troops.

An unnecessarily complicated plot is reduced to plenty of running around, as writer and director Charles Marquis Warren struggles to add quality to his own story. Filmed in Technicolor and 3D, the ambition to create a Cold War Casablanca echo is clear, and the context-setting opening scene at the airport is not bad. But most of Flight To Tangier consists of Walker manhandling Susan and Nicki as they run then drive this way then that, first inside the city then in the countryside, escaping from inept bad guys and incompetent police officers on their way to a rendevouz with Hank.

Despite the surrounding dangers Nicki and Susan engage in a claws-out American versus European womanly battle royale for Walker's attention. They remain dressed in showy gowns and high heels throughout, except for an interlude where Nicki disrobes to seduce her target at a wilderness lake. And when the shooting starts, the action scenes are laughably stiff and atrociously executed.

The illegal weapons trading behind all the chasing is explained in droplets, this being a film where the characters know all the answers but only reveal them verbally at the whims of the script. Eventually a half-baked Cold War conspiracy emerges featuring secret government agents and double-crossing, but with all the characters behaving with stiff irrationally the fundamentals crumble into a globby heap.

The climax achieves a peak of absurdity, the jaw-dropping imperative of one character walking into a bank on his own justifying a bloody street shootout that leaves Tangier littered with corpses. But the guy does walk into the bank on his own.

Joan Fontaine, Jack Palance and Corinne Calvet are all much better than this material, but here they are lost on the studio-bound dusty side-streets, caught with cheap tickets to the wrong destination.

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Movie Review: Sudden Fear (1952)

A woman-in-distress suspense drama, Sudden Fear features stylish tension, playful plotting, and an overabundance of wide-eyed acting.

Myra Hudson (Joan Crawford) is an independently wealthy and successful middle-aged playwright, about to launch her new Broadway show. During rehearsals she insists on firing actor Lester Blaine (Jack Palance), because she does not believe he is handsome enough for the leading role. The show opens and is a great success.

On a train trip back to her hometown of San Francisco, Myra bumps into Lester. He is exceptionally gracious, they spend time together, fall in love and are soon married. Myra is deliriously happy to have found true love and starts planning to update her will to include Lester. Suddenly a woman called Irene (Gloria Grahame) appears in their social circle, and everything changes.

An RKO Pictures production with Crawford a driving force in pulling the project together, Sudden Fear has enough quality to engage. Romance, drama, deception and murder plots gel into a potent Hitchcockian noir package.

A slow and prolonged first half introduces the main characters but plays more like a fluffy romance than any kind of thriller. The suspense elements take off in the second half with a ticking clock, greed, a compromised conspiracy and a convoluted preemptive revenge plan. Director David Miller deploys plenty of panache and a large serving of style as he focuses on Myra's predicament to deftly skip past some of the unlikely logic.

With Crawford fully committed to an almost silent movie level of overacting, Miller optimizes what he has. The dialogue all but disappears from the final 30 minutes, the excellent Elmer Bernstein music takes over and genuine tension is generated as despite the preponderance of plotters, nothing goes according to any plan. The twisty and hilly San Francisco locations (with some subbing by Los Angeles) echo the intermingling plots and add plenty of ambience.

The good cast contributes to the enjoyment level. With Crawford consuming the sets and her costars with her eyes, Jack Palance provides a robust counterpart as a complex charmer and struggling actor intent on proving just how good he is at romance. Gloria Grahame as Irene introduces a jolt of naked avarice, impatient to grab her undeserved slice of what rich society has to offer. Bruce Bennett and Mike Connors appear as brothers and lawyers Steve and Junior Keaney, the latter also entangled with Irene.

Miller throws in plenty of toys and red herrings to maintain an edge. Technology in the form of a sophisticated (for the day) recording system stands alongside playfulness represented by a wind-up dog gadget to amplify moments of revelation and tension. Any film where a tiny toy dog is transformed into a suspense device is tracking in the right direction.

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Movie Review: Cops And Robbersons (1994)

A feeble comedy, Cops And Robbersons contains no laughs and plenty of stupidity.

Norman and Helen Robberson (Chevy Chase and Dianne Wiest) are a typical married couple raising their three kids in suburbia. Norman is a television police show geek, but his family is drifting apart. Veteran cop Jake Stone (Jack Palance) and his younger partner Tony Moore (David Barry Gray) need to set up a stakeout to keep close tabs on master forger and killer Osborn (Robert Davi), who happens to live next door to the Robbersons.

Jake and Tony invade Norman's house and set up an observation post in an upstairs bedroom. The family struggles to adjust to the unwelcome visitors, but gradually Jake starts to earn the respect of the Robbersons in a way that Norman never could. With Osborn plotting a big new deal, Norman interferes with the stakeout, frustrating Jake, while Norman's daughter Cindy (Fay Masterson) sets her eyes on the dishy young Tony.

Directed by Michael Ritchie and written by Lindsay Maher, Cops and Robbersons is 93 minutes of abject tedium. Only fans of Chevy Chase enthralled by his stupid family guy schtick will find any pleasure in an underdeveloped and tired story that never gains any traction. The characters are barely defined, the evil crimes of Osborn are mostly unexplained, and both the police work and the attempted comedy are half hearted and generally comatose.

The film is largely housebound, the energy level static, the production values reeking of an underfunded television show.

With almost nothing to work with, Ritchie leans heavily on Jack Palance, and he hisses his way through the film in a caricature of his late career City Slickers-propelled resurgence. The problem is that Palance, here at age 75, is far too old to be a convincing cop and genuinely seems to be struggling to get his lines out. The only tension in the film is whether Palance the actor will make it through his scenes intact.

Cops And Robbersons has neither chuckles nor action: just stars and a director who should know better, wallowing in the muck.

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The Movies Of Jack Palance

All movies starring Jack Palance and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Panic In The Streets (1950)

Sudden Fear (1952)

Shane (1953)

Flight To Tangier (1953)

The Professionals (1966)

Chato's Land (1972)

Young Guns (1988)

Batman (1989)

Tango & Cash (1989)

City Slickers (1991)

Cops And Robbersons (1994)

All Ace Black Movie Blog Reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: The Professionals (1966)

A sturdy western with a stellar cast, The Professionals features an arduous cross-border rescue mission traversing an unforgiving desert, with plenty of time for shifting allegiances, character surprises and well-executed action.

Early in the 1900s with a Mexican revolution still raging, American businessman Joe Grant (Ralph Bellamy) hires a group of four mercenaries to rescue his kidnapped wife Maria (Claudia Cardinale) from the clutches of Mexican revolutionary leader Raza (Jack Palance). The hired men are gunnery expert Rico (Lee Marvin), explosives master Bill Dolworth (Burt Lancaster), scout and archery ace Jake Sharp (Woody Strode) and respected horse trainer Hans Ehrengard (Robert Ryan). Rico and Dolworth used to be part of the revolutionary forces, fighting alongside Raza.

Rico leads the group across arid terrain towards the guerrilla leader's headquarters. Along the way they have to navigate through treacherous canyons, fend off bandits, and survive extreme heat and exhaustion. Once they arrive near Raza's compound Rico has to devise a plan to infiltrate the camp and rescue Maria from under the nose of the ragtag revolutionary army, but many surprises await.

Directed, written and produced by Richard Brooks, The Professionals carries a Magnificent Four type premise, with slightly less charisma but more plot twists. Brooks keeps the action moving and regularly inserts skirmishes with assorted bandits to keep the gunplay quotient up and establish the credentials of the professionals ahead of the showdown with Raza. Good production values and magnificent Coachella Valley scenery captured by cinematographer Conrad L. Hall elevate the film to a visual treat.

The character interaction scenes are not as effective. The four men do not have sufficient definition to convey depth. Dolworth is a free-wheeling womanizer, Hans is older, more feeble and generally out of place. Sharp says little and Rico is the stoic leader. Other than Dolworth being more money-driven and lascivious than the others, Brooks is unable to generate much in the way of personality.

Both the action and the moral dilemmas improve once the group arrives at Raza's compound. The attempt to extract Maria generates the central plot twist, and the subsequent plot elements unfold with renewed urgency. The professionals get to question their purpose, their quest and their motives, and Dolworth, the most mercenary among them, will have the biggest questions to answer.

The impressive cast members share the screen time, with Marvin and Lancaster most prominent. Marvin's Rico fits straight into the actor's screen persona as the unflappable team leader, while Lancaster struggles to convince as a more jovial dynamite specialist with a carefree attitude. Ryan, Strode, Palance, Cardinale and Bellamy are thoroughly competent but don't get much to work with in terms of texture and intensity modulation.

The Professionals are a lively bunch, well worth accompanying on their difficult mission. They may lack some wit and wisdom, but they make up for it in loud and efficient execution.

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Movie Review: Shane (1953)

A classic Western, Shane perfectly blends all the genre elements into a monumental package. The story of a mysterious gunman helping homesteaders defend their land against evil cattlemen captures the mythology of a changing landscape, with one lifestyle expiring and another setting down roots.

In rural Wyoming, Joe and Marian Starrett (Van Heflin and Jean Arthur) are working hard to create a home for themselves and their young son Joey (Brandon deWilde). A soft-spoken loner known only as Shane (Alan Ladd) passes by and witnesses the Starretts being intimidated by cattleman Rufus Ryker (Emil Meyer) and his rough band of cowboys, including Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson). Rufus believes that homesteaders are unwelcome invaders, opportunistic latecomers to land tamed by cattlemen, disrupting the landscape with fences and crops.

Shane is attracted to the life of domesticity, and accepts Joe's offer of a job. He hangs up his gun and tries to adapt to life helping out on the farm. Young Joey quickly sees Shane as a hero and starts idolizing him. Ryker tries all combinations of threats and promises to scare off the Starretts and the other homesteaders including the particularly headstrong Frank 'Stonewall' Torrey (Elisha Cook Jr.), but the stubborn Joe does not yield and repeatedly inspires the others to stand firm. In desperation Ryker brings in notorious gunslinger Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) to threaten the farmers with abrupt violence, setting off a seminal confrontation.

Meticulously directed by George Stevens with exquisite care to achieve perfect framing and perspective, Shane is an engaging story presented as a feast for all the senses. The tension is introduced early on through the eyes of young Joey, and the confrontation between two lifestyles underpins an exploration of manhood and contrasting visions of the future.

The themes are grand and given suitable room to evolve in the breathtakingly beautiful landscape. Shane is based on a 1949 novel by Jack Schaefer and inspired (although it is not mentioned) by the infamous Johnson County War. Joe Starrett and Rufus Ryker cannot both thrive in the future, and no less than the destiny of a nation is represented in their struggle of wills. Starrett represents hope that there is room for families, children, settlements and a lifestyle not governed by guns and violence. Ryker is threatened by fences, rows of crops, limits on where and when he can drive his cattle, and cannot fathom a West parcelled off and sold out to farming families.

The one thing Shane is sure of is that gunmen like himself and Wilson will have no role to play in whichever future unfolds. The days of disputes being settled by gunfights are drawing to an end, and Shane is already making his way to nowhere when the film opens. He desperately tries to fit into the Starrett's way of life, enjoying Joe's friendship, Joey's hero-worship and Marian's more coy but also unmistakable signals of attention. But he also sees his negative influence on Joey, the boy naturally attracted to gunmanship and violence, and in his own way Shane is just as incompatible with Joe Starrett as Ryker is.

Shane: What's your offer, Ryker?
Ryker: To you, not a thing.
Shane: That's too bad.
Ryker: Too bad?
Shane: Yeah, you've lived too long. Your kind of days are over.
Ryker: My days! What about yours, gunfighter?
Shane: The difference is I know it.

The action set-pieces are magnificently staged. Shane's opening entrance and Wilson's later first appearance are brilliant examples of men drifting across the landscape to impose their will on the winds of destiny. There is a memorable bar fight between Shane and Chris Calloway that expands into a brawl. Stonewall trudges through the mud of a barely defined civilization with Wilson towering over him. And the final stand-off to settle the conflict once and for all is an echo from the past that will cascade into the future.

Alan Ladd as the gunman with a conscience and Van Heflin as the homemaker with an intractable dedication to his land deliver career defining performances, while Jack Palance creates quite an intimidating, almost soulless villain. Through no fault of his own, the performance of youngster Brandon deWilde has not aged well. The script saddled him with annoying lines of dialogue and endless whiny questions, with almost every single phrase out of his mouth containing Shane's name. In his one miscalculation Stevens includes endless reaction shots of young Joey's face, and the child actor was simply not up to the task.

Otherwise, Stevens' direction and editing is masterful. Filming near Jackson Hole, Wyoming with the imposing Grand Tetons providing a stunning backdrop, the film is filled with spectacular scenery. The choice of perspective is frequently dazzling, with the camera often placing seemingly peripheral children, wives and faithful family dogs at the centre of the screen while heated adult confrontations unfold. The men are settling the future, but it is the families who will live and die with the outcomes.

The audio effects are equally impressive. There are few shots fired in the film, but Stevens carefully recreated the deafening aural impact of every single shot, a rare instance where the startling impact of each bullet is emphasized to drive home the implications of life and death at the mercy of a gun.

Shane: I gotta be goin' on.
Joey: Why, Shane?
Shane: A man has to be what he is, Joey. You can't break the mold. I tried it and it didn't work for me.
Joey: We want you, Shane.
Shane: Joey, there's no living with, with a killing. There's no going back from it. Right or wrong, it's a brand, a brand that sticks. There's no going back. Now you run on home to your mother and tell her, tell her everything's alright, and there aren't any more guns in the valley.

Shane is the perfect ode to a remote west emerging from lawlessness, where a clash of ambitions defined the soul of a fledgling nation.

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Movie Review: Young Guns (1988)

A western with a cast dominated by a batch of up-and-coming Hollywood male stars, Young Guns is a fairly faithful account of Billy the Kid's early days. Rampant youthfulness dominates the film but cannot make up for the lack of depth.

It's the 1870s in Lincoln County, New Mexico. English cattle rancher John Tunstall (Terence Stamp) specializes in rescuing troubled youth, giving them jobs and an education at his ranch. His latest recruit is young Billy Bonney (Emilio Estevez), a boyish and cocky troublemaker who has apparently already killed a man. Billy joins the other ranch hands in Tunstall's employment: the romantic Doc (Kiefer Sutherland), the serious Dick (Charlie Sheen), the half-Indian Chavez (Lou Diamond Phillips), the appropriately nicknamed Dirty Steve (Dermot Mulroney) and his friend Charlie (Casey Siemaszko). Collectively they call themselves the Regulators.

Tunstall is locked in a nasty dispute over control of the cattle business with Lawrence Murphy (Jack Palance), who has bought the law and is trying to monopolize the local industry. Tunstall has an ally in respected lawyer Alexander McSween (Terry O'Quinn), but this does not save him: Murphy's men kill Tunstall in cold bold. The Regulators vow revenge and are initially deputized to act as lawmen, with Dick assuming a leadership role. But Billy has his own version of dispensing justice, and starts killing rather than arresting men associated with Murphy, further inflaming what became known as the Lincoln County War.

Young Guns forms a cactus pack of sorts to maraud across the west, the six Regulators boasting the presence of Sheen (Platoon), Phillips (La Bamba) and Sutherland (The Lost Boys) soon after their break-out roles. Estevez was already hot property with the success of Stakeout, Repo Man, The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire. It is an impressive collection of burgeoning talent, and Young Guns is brimming with the potential of ambitious young men. That some of their hairstyles and mannerisms are more suited to the 1980s rather than the 1870s does not seriously diminish the available enjoyment. Estevez gets the showiest role as Billy The Kid, and he enjoys the self-propelling wild-eyed thrill that comes with leaving morality to one side and just engaging in mischievous killing.

The story itself is a slightly fictionalized account of a real and violent dispute characterized by mindless tit-for-tat killings, where men with more guns than brains tried to muscle each other out of the cattle business, and violent revenge took precedence over justice. It was fertile territory for the likes of Billy to shoot first and ask no questions, and director Christopher Cain inserts scenes of well-staged, noisy and often violent gunfights at regular intervals throughout the movie.

It's when the guns are silent that the film is caught short. After the relatively early demise of John Tunstall, the John Fusco script struggles to find a weighty presence capable of carrying the movie. The Regulators are young, naive and simply not very interesting people when they are not engaged in shooting or being shot at. The elementary attempts at some meaningful exchanges of dialogue are quickly blown into the winds of shallowness.

And so Young Guns awkwardly gropes around trying to find various methods of killing time between the action set pieces. Doc falls in love with Murphy's Chinese slave; Dick and Billy compete for the group's leadership, Chavez sneers at everyone who insults his ethnicity, and Dirty Steve spits a lot. None of it is deep, and all of it is mundane.

A rough and ready supporting cast does succeed in bringing to life some real wild west characters. Lawman Pat Garrett (Patrick Wayne), Sheriff William Brady (Danny Kamin), frontiersman Buckshot Roberts (Brian Keith) and outlaw / bounty hunter John Kinney (Allen Keller) make brief but often noisy appearances to play their roles in a nasty little war.

Young Guns fires away at the legends of the west, generating plenty of energetic movement but limited substance.

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Movie Review: Batman (1989)

The film that reignited interest in the adaptation of comics to the screen, Batman is a curious mess. An engrossing dark visual aesthetic is ultimately wasted on a miserable story that simply runs out of script.

In Gotham City, a mysterious giant bat is terrifying the city's muggers. Newspaper reporter Alexander Knox (Robert Wuhl) is keen to get to the bottom of the story, and is soon joined in his hunt by famous photographer Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger). The batman is actually wealthy businessman Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton), out to counter the crime wave sweeping across the city. Vicki and Wayne are soon having dinner and falling in love.

Meanwhile, the criminal masterminds who control mayhem in the city are having a war of their own. Mastermind Carl Grissom (Jack Palance) attempts to get rid of his partner Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson). Napier is double-crossed in a set-up, and drops into a vat of chemicals. After a botched attempt at plastic surgery, Napier transforms himself into the hideous Joker, a mad villain stuck with a wicked smile, pasty white skin and coloured hair. The Joker gets his revenge on Grissom and unleashes his fury on the citizens of Gotham City, but finds Batman in his way at every turn.

Filmed in the midst of job action by Hollywood writers, Batman's first half holds together but the back end disintegrates into what can only be described as a narrative farce. The characters are abandoned in their outfits, almost literally wondering what to do next. Some supposedly high profile characters, notably Billy Dee Williams as district attorney Harvey Dent, struggle to even justify their existence. When the Joker gets ready to unleash deadly gas from balloons, Batman spends an eternity inexplicably zooming around the sky in his Batplane, doing an excellent imitation of a test drive for a new toy just long enough for the Joker to start causing carnage.

But the disaster is complete during an endless climax that starts in confusion and ends in disarray, the Joker forcing Vicki to climb the stairs of a cathedral for the purpose of...dancing with her? Batman gets real close to demonstrating "make it up as you go along" right on the screen, and at a total production cost of $48 million.

With no coherent story to tell, director Tim Burton fills his imagery with Jack Nicholson, the Joker stealing the movie from Batman. While Nicholson is initially undoubtedly entertaining with his boyish devil charm, in this case too much of the Joker is not a good thing. Nicholson's ugly mug and irritating laugh are overexposed to distraction, his demeanour quickly growing tiresome rather than menacing.  In comparison, Michael Keaton's Batman is plain and boring, the feeble attempts to link Jack Napier to Bruce Wayne's childhood agonies missing the emotional mark.

The supposed romance between Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale equally rings hollow, and appears driven by nothing except the requirements of the half-baked script. Kim Basinger does little to convince anyone that she is a celebrated photojournalist.

Burton does score all his points in delivering a stunning visual style to Batman.  The mythical Gotham City is industrial revolution meets steam punk, a place where the sun never shines, the buildings are all black, and everything is both imposing and just slightly askew. The costumes and set designs are memorable, and the Batmobile is an impressive piece of indestructible machinery. Given that all the action takes place in the absence of natural light, Burton does well to maintain clarity during the movie's more hectic kinetic moments.

Despite its weaknesses, Batman created the template for releasing, marketing and capitalizing on the in-built audience for comic book adaptations, a franchise-creating formula that has lasted for a generation. Comics fans will always flock to see their superheroes graduate from motionless panels to moving pictures, but even the best heroes need the help of a meaningful plot to truly soar.

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