BATMAN: CHAOS IN GOTHAM

Last year George Lucas got pissey with a few cats who took his precious Episode One and edited out, or altered, all the Jar-Jar nonsense. Methinks all the fuss was about a few kids and their computers who made his truly inferior film a good bit more watchable.

Hollywood egos. What you gonna do...

If something like improving a single movie was enough to throw a filmmaker into a hissy, then chances are Warner Brothers is going to break out an entire gaggle of lawyers regarding BATMAN: CHAOS IN GOTHAM. This movie makes a mockery out of an entire franchise!

BATMAN: CHAOS IN GOTHAM is designed to show just how generic and formulaic that Billion dollar franchise is. What we have are scenes taken from each film and edited in such a way that a new, equally compelling movie is created. Hell, when compared to the Joel Shuemacher entries, CIG is a far superior work.

Picture a highlights reel with a plot.

All the villains from all the movies are accounted for, even the embarrassingly bad Arnold Schwartzenegger as Mr. Freeze. One night they decide it's high time to make like the dookey and hit the Gotham fan with all the force of a fat man who spent all afternoon working his way through the buffet table.

While the suit varies from movie to movie with the different actors playing Batman, viewers are treated to only one Bruce Wayne. A friend once said to me that any actor can put on the cape but you need someone special who can really bring it together to play Bat's troubled alter ego. To date, Michael Keaton is regarded as the best of the three actors to have played Wayne. That might have more to do with those working behind the scenes rather than Keaton's abilities as an actor, but in any regard, he's the Wayne we get here.

Thank God too, Val Kilmer is just such a boring actor.

Played up are the sexual dynamics of the other films. Playboy Wayne's faithful girlfriend Vicky Vale waits by as he flirts with Bat's desire for the Catwoman. There's also all the homo-erotic fluff Schuemacher threw in. The result is eerily confusing and would have any adolescent who is questioning his sexuality even more in self-doubt about which path is right for them as neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality are shown in a positive light.

Who would have thunk it...when all that kinky subtext is juxtaposed it actually takes on meaning. And please notice I didn't say "a new" or "a different meaning". The Schumacher entries are so damn shallow that any meaning is a new meaning; one that wasn't there before.

The only flaw in this editing project is the unresolved plotlines regarding some of villains. The focus is on the Batman-Catwoman relationship, but Joker, Two-Face, Riddler, and Mr. Freeze all make appearances. If they are going to play a major part of the story, then their threads should be left dangling. At the very least, their final scenes in CHAOS IN GOTHAM should have been cliffhangers to be resolved the next day....er....installment.

I've always found the Batman series to be lightweight, but that didn't stop me from buying into it when Warner Brothers first launched it back in 1989. I bought all the merchandise I could get my grubby little hands on. BATMAN: CHAOS IN GOTHAM shows me and the countless millions who lined up for hours on end to hand over our hard earned cash to be nothing more than sheep who fell victim to marketing regardless of the quality of the movies themselves. That alone is probably more depth than all the films combined.

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