Word: batmans
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Sometimes it pays off: Batman Forever grabbed $106 million in its first 10 days in North American theaters. But the strategy has a sort of kamikaze logic. Since there are more big movies than early-summer weekends, most films--even the hits--will be seven-day wonders. So it has been, with few exceptions, this season. Crimson Tide gives way to Die Hard with a Vengeance is vaporized by Casper gets eaten by Congo is beaten by Batman Forever gets a poke in the eye from Pocahontas. Hey, it's a jungle out there. One weekend you're the lion...
...Joan Chen--Judge Dredd couldn't have worse timing. For one thing, it surfaces at the end of a 15-year line of dark sci-fi films; imagine Blade Runner inside a Tron video game. For another, the movie tries for the same combination of facetiousness and majesty that Batman Forever mined only two weeks before. Dredd, written by Michael De Luca, William Wisher and Steven de Souza, plays like an instant clone of the Gotham Gothic...
...Batman Forever," which opened in many cities last weekend, broke all box office records, drawing more crowds than even "Jurassic Park." While the last part of the Batman trilogy many not be able to boast the same pastoral cinematography, it is worlds more suspenseful than this quiet drama...
...Ling's sumptuous production design is mainly a reminder of better, quirkier films (Blade Runner, The Hudsucker Proxy). The special-effects aces have created a big destruct-o-fest, with explosions all over Gotham, yet the film is pizazz deficient. A series of set pieces with no forward momentum, Batman Forever drags laboriously, as if the Batmobile were being towed away with the emergency brake still on. The picture leaves thick black skid marks...
...plot? Umm, we've forgotten it -- probably a threat to Gotham by some bad people -- but we know there was a lot of it. Lots of characters too. Robin (Chris O'Donnell) joins the series, which undercuts Batman's heroic loneliness. Nicole Kidman, as the requisite love interest, is little more than a party decoration. And two villains are too many. Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face and Jim Carrey as the Riddler have dueling star turns, with Carrey winning, of course; he can torture the most innocent banalities, like a simple "Well, yes," into delirious comedy...