We’ve already talked up the other actors who were almost cast as Batman, and who would have sucked way, way more than Ben Affleck ever could, and now attention must turn to those actors who have already appeared in Batman movies. From the villainous to the virtuous, and the supporting roles stuffed between, the actors on this list have all been entrusted with the considerable responsibility of playing a character from the Batman universe.
To various degrees, all have failed in one way or another.
Considering the casting of Affleck has been suggested as the single worst thing to ever happen to the Batman franchise, it may come as some surprise to those hyperbole-spewing fanboys that their beloved franchise has been trodden all over by bad actors before, and there is no way Affleck’s performance in the upcoming spin-off/sequel could do any more harm to the property than has already been done.
Equally, there’s probably very little chance he’ll be able to pull of this sort of committed acting either…
Now that is creative restraint.
The moments collected here are the worst performance related tics, quirks and creative decisions by the actors themselves. They’re the most distracting, the most embarrassing, and the most cringe-worthy performance related moments in the history of the Batman franchise, from Adam West onwards. Unlike bat-nipples and bat credit cards, the blame here lies solely with the actors (as well, perhaps as the directors who let them get away with it.)
Honourable Mention
All Of The Ladies… Almost
There was a long period – pretty much from Burton’s Catwoman to Nolan’s Selina Kyle – when female characters in Batman movies were woefully misrepresented. They were either completed wasted, and turned into sex objects (like Nicole Kidman and Drew Barrymore,) or badly drawn walking innuendos (Uma Thurman,) or they were little more than representative of a narrative obstacle that Batman or Bruce Wayne had to overcome (Katie Holmes, Maggie Gyllenhaal.)
None of those acting talents, who have almost all proven themselves worthier talents than some of the male actors given far more substantial roles, were ever given the opportunity to actually do any acting, either demuring in the background, smoldering in the foreground, or being personified symbols that the audience could never wholly relate to as individuals.
Strictly speaking, it was never actually their fault, given the scripting issues, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that there was such a gaping hole where the female talent should have been for so long.
11. Christian Bale’s Growl
The inherent duplicity of Batman’s character, and the need for disguise inevitably means that some degree of vocal enhancement or tampering is necessary. From Michael Keaton to George Clooney, whispering was about the only concession the actors made in their performance, and sometimes, they didn’t even stick to that rigidly, but then along came Christian Bale who took the need to the extreme, and impressed Christopher Nolan so much, he was immediately bowled over by his audition.
The thinking behind the growl isn’t up for criticism – not only does the growl hide the voice of one of Gotham’s most recognisable society figures, it also adds to the mystique and threat of the character – but the delivery became something of a joke over the course of the trilogy. When he gets particularly excited, Bale is just as indecipherable as Bane, and as an indication of how the actor lost sight of the fundamentals of that part of his performance, he uses the Batman voice when he clearly doesn’t need to.
It’s hard to tell whether Bale is actually self-parodying, given how overblown his growl becomes – particularly when he gets all animated.
By the end of The Dark Knight Rises, Bane’s mumble, Batman’s growl and Alfred’s chewy cockney were all getting a little out of hand – especially the latter pair, who seem to have decided to dial up their vocal tics in an effort to bring more emotional intensity into their performances. The result was the film feeling like the actors were doing bad impressions of their own performances, which was hardly the best way to make what they were actually saying matter.
10. Matthew Modine’s Entire Performance
Up until The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s Tarantino-like penchant for casting cult and occasionally forgotten actors hadn’t missed a beat, but the decision to cast Full Metal Jacket star Matthew Modine as conniving top cop Foley was a step too far.
It’s obvious that the character is there to be hated – he is the antithesis of everything Commissioner Gordon represents, and Nolan had spent so much time building up the mythology of Gordon, any opposing force was bound to come off as a malignant one. But, Modine’s performance lacks the nuances that most of his co-stars bring to their performances: his villain is blatant, to an almost pantomime-like degree, and though we are invited to openly hate him (to give weight to his ultimate heroic about-turn,) it’s actually difficult to care much either way what happens to him.
It seems even Nolan got sick of the character’s screen-time by the conclusion of the film, giving him an honourable change of heart, but not following up with the hero’s death that the script seemed to be setting up. Instead, Foley becomes a statistic of the most ludicrously conceived, and tactically hilarious street battle in the history of cinema, showing his unsuitability to be considered in the same breath as Gordon or Batman, by leading a charge of unarmed (other than close combat weapons) police against tanks and guns.
9. Adam West Makes Batman More Of A Clown Than The Joker
The passage of time has been kind to Adam West: he has gone from being the lead of the disastrous, and inevitably cancelled Batman TV show, which almost threatened to kill the Batman comic, such was its permeating malevolence, to being a beloved, self-parodying hero.
But there is no glossing over the fact that West, and the 1960s show’s producers and writing team should be held accountable for what they did in the name of Batman. The show might now be considered a kitsch, camp delight, but it has been forgiven by the sands of time, and the distance now put between it and Nolan’s take on the property, and on its own terms, it is a creative travesty.
Not only did it completely ignore the context of the characters, which were enjoying a resurgence thanks to a move towards grittier content, it also featured some acting performances that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a day-time soap opera. There is a reason why Adam West, Burt Ward, and even Cesar Romero aren’t particularly well-known for their careers away from the show: they simply weren’t very good actors.
The show was camp, badly-written, and downright stupid, and West’s performance as Batman was the personification of everything that was wrong (and perversely, everything that is now loved) with the show. His straight performance was funny but one-dimensional, and he reduced Batman to an anachronism and an amalgam of every bad cowboy hero, and superhero serial star
8. Juno Temple Turns Up, Sluts About & Disappears Entirely
If her biographical details weren’t so easily accessible online, you might be forgiven for thinking there were two Juno Temples: the first being the fine actress who made big, brief waves in Atonement and Notes On A Scandal, and who smartly went on to play important roles in Mr Nobody, Killer Joe and Lovelace to great success, via an odd, but entertaining stint in Kaboom!
The other Juno must then be the young actress who has made Year One, The Three Musketeers and two St. Trinian’s movies, as well as seeing the majority of what looked like it was supposed to be an important role cut out of The Dark Knight Rises.
Temple’s character Jen was hotly debated before the film’s release, which rumours suggesting a possible reference to Harley Quinn, and others rightly suggesting she would be an anchor for Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle, who might add a humanity to Kyle’s thievery, making her the new, sexier Robin Hood. Her appearances also seem to suggest that was the initial intention, given the unexpressed (and possibly homosexual) relationship between Jen and Selina, which is then immediately dropped and swept under the nearest carpet as soon as Selina starts to hang out with Batman a bit more.
Temple’s delivery of what remains of the character is terrible: she is basically the stereotypical drugged up girl in the stairwell, without any real impact on the narrative thanks to sloppy scripting, and a completely unexplored backstory that fails to establish why Selina would be seen dead with her.
7. “No, I Came Back To Stop You!”
Say what you want about Kevin Smith, but the actor/writer/director/critic hater knows his comic books, and presumably knows a good deal about comic book movies. When his friend Ben Affleck was revealed as the next Batman, the Clerks creator somewhat predictably weighed in on the debate to state that he was overjoyed at the casting, and that it was the right direction to go in. Friendship obviously never came into his thoughts.
Smith rightly pointed out that Christian Bale’s Batman voice was worthy of criticism, and suggests a way to improve it for future films, but his more pertinent point, for the sake of this article, is his dissection of Bale’s overall performance as Batman. He stated that Affleck could do a better job with some of the lines that Bale had made something of a mess of, and in particular the response he gives to Bane’s challenge of ”So you’ve come back to die with your city?”
In response, Batman says, “No, I came back to stop you!” which Smith says is “one of the worst lines in cinema history.” It’s not just the writing that is off, but the performance itself. By now, Bale has become a parody of his own performance, and the line, which is presumably designed to be hard-hitting is delivered without so much as a morsel of emotion.
A line that should define the entire final act of the film lands on the floor with a soft, wet thud, and sets in motion the most underwhelming final battle between good and evil seen in comic book movies.
6. Tommy Lee Goes Full Jack Nicholson
Burton’s Batman movies were full of great villains from top to bottom: even the henchmen were memorable, so it’s not at all surprising that Joel Schumacher chose to base both of his Batman Forever villains on Burton’s most iconic villain, The Joker.
The Riddler is arguably the least obvious of the two, since Jim Carrey brings so much of his usual mugging routine to the character, and it’s easy to imagine Edward Nigma as a not-too-distant cousin of The Mask, but in Two Face, we were treated to a Joker clone in different clothing.
The direction was clearly designed to such ends, but Tommy Lee Jones’ performance draws so heavily on Nicholson’s Joker that he fails to bring anything of Two Face to the screen at all, aside from his look and the coin motif. It is a blatant attempt to cash in on the unconscious appeal of the character, but at the same time it meant that Jones was never able to offer his own performance, and the heritage of the character was basically flushed down the toilet.
5. “I’ll Get Drive-Thru”
Val Kilmer gets a bad lot for his performance as Batman in Joel Schumacher’s over-blown, but not awful Batman Forever. He was perhaps a victim of Michael Keaton’s disarming success as the caped crusader, as well as Schumacher’s wayward attempt to channel Burton’s gothic spirit, but without the creative tools, or the restraint to do so, and his actual performance tends to be overlooked for what the film meant to the franchise in general.
Kilmer’s Bruce Wayne was a little too stuffy, and lacked the natural charisma that almost all of the other Batman actors – including George Clooney – brought to that side of the role, but his Batman was darker and more mysterious than Clooney’s, and his line delivery was better, and less comical than Christian Bale.
But Kilmer was hampered by a terrible script, which set an early precedent during the opening tooling-up sequence, with the God-awful “I’ll get drive-thru” line that hung onto Kilmer’s character like a bad smell for the rest of the film. It would be almost impossible to deliver that sort of throw-away, reductively comical line without sounding phoney, and so it proved for Kilmer.
Not only is the delivery bad, but the line itself, with its long set-up and cheap pay-off doesn’t fit the scene, or what we had come to expect of Batman in Burton’s movies.
4. The Dancing – Oh God, The Dancing
We’ve already mentioned quite recently that the worrying trend of making superheroes and villains dance will probably be one of the reasons the comic book genre dies in coming years (if it continues at its frightening rate of appearance, that is) and it seems the Batman franchise is the worst single property.
It would be quite easy to assume that the flamboyance was all down to Joel Schumacher, but the dancing started way before the colourful director ever got his paws on the batsuit, with Tim Burton’s Joker.
This wouldn’t be the only instance of jarring, and frankly camp behaviour from Burton’s Joker, despite how incredible that performance largely is, since we were also treated to the odd spectacle of the art gallery scene, which felt more like it should have been part of Adam West’s Batman universe, rather than Burton’s darker, more gothic iteration.
Clearly, Joel Schumacher was enthralled by how successful The Joker’s dancing had been in such a key theme, and chose to bring his own dancing goon in for Batman Forever, sucking every last drop of restraint out of Jim Carrey’s performance, which could and should have been a lot creepier, and a lot more complex, had Carrey actually put his skills into it.
Instead, we got this…
Carrey’s Riddler dances twice in the film, which is precisely twice more than should have happened at all: it serves no purpose, and while some might suggest it’s the cherry on top of his eccentric sundae, the truth is that the physical comedy is mostly unnecessary for the role, and was indulged merely as a means to justify Carrey in the role.
3. Alicia Silverstone Can’t Talk
Batman & Robin is rightly confirmed as the worst modern Batman movie – it is still a world ahead of the 1966 Batman movie starring Adam West – and by some distance. The direction was undisciplined and ill-conceived, the art direction was poor, and the whole tone was a million miles away from that which had made Tim Burton’s Batman movies so enduringly popular.
There’s clearly no debate that the worst things about the film were the villains, with a sex-pot Poison Ivy joining the comically overblown Bane, over-powered by ludicrous day-glo toxins (the most pertinent personification of a film’s problems that’s ever been) and the muscular, quiptastic Mr Freeze. All were bad ideas, but they were joined at the top of the unwanted additions list by Alicia Silverstone’s inconceivably bad Batgirl.
Not content with bringing in one distracting sidekick, Schumacher decided to bring Alfred’s suspiciously American niece Barbara to give us all the chance to see Alicia Silverstone’s shapely rear end clad in leather in an extreme close-up. Oh, and her leather-clad breasts too.
Sadly, Clueless was clearly a blip in Silverstone’s mostly unremarkable career, and she showed her inappropriateness for the role by failing to actually deliver lines without sounding like she was the kind of “tired and emotional” that actors tend to get on TV shows, just before they toddle off the rehab. Words don’t so much flow out of her as wrestle their way out of, and trip over her lips, and she’s hardly the kind of actor you would choose if your film relied on the cheap pay-off of comical quips.
2. Katie Holmes – Meh
The one time Mrs Tom Cruise wasn’t given too much of an opportunity to dazzle in Batman Begins, since the role of Rachel Dawes was invented as a symbol and a moral compass for the occasionally wayward Bruce Wayne, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that she proved herself woefully under-equipped to play such an important narrative role.
The key to any character who is little more than a plot device is for the performance to be memorable enough to hide the agenda: Michael Caine managed it with Alfred, despite the fact that pretty much every one of his lines could be taken out of The Little Book Of Paternal Reassurance (or The Little Book Of Exposition in the case of The Dark Knight Rises,) but Holmes’ performance was one-dimensional and cold, and it’s near impossible to understand why she is the centre of Bruce’s moral and emotional world.
By the time Rachel dies (albeit in the hands of another, far superior actress) it’s still difficult to really care, which makes Batman’s decision to retire for eight years on the back of the tragedy that little bit more difficult to take. That all stems from the fact that we aren’t given enough development of the character in Begins, or enough sparkle in the performance to make her anything other than a walking, talking plot device.
1. Arnie Wins The Worst Competition Ever
Joel Schumacher’s hopes for Arnold Schwazenegger’s association with Batman & Robin must have been high, considering the director allowed the muscle-bound future governator to be given top billing in a film starring someone else, and you can almost imagine the director’s unbribled glee as he finally saw his star turn delivering the carefully crafted by Akiva Goldsman (who would somehow later write A Beautiful Mind.)
Sadly, for Schumacher, and for every Batman fan who has seen Batman & Robin, Arnie was about as suited to playing Mr Freeze as he would be to playing Martin Luther King, and the presence of the action movie “God” turned the script into a stockpile of some of the most embarrassing, cringeworthy one-liners and “witty” quips that have ever been conceived.
The character design was one thing, with his sparkly blue face raising more than a few eyebrows, and even more question marks, but Arnie’s pantomime delivery, and the lack of a relatable human element (the most key part of any villain, as Schumacher clearly never learned) were the nails that drove the coffin lid down. Thanks to that performance, Mr Freeze will probably not be considered a viable on-screen villain for future Batman movies for some time, because the negative associations are simply too much of a stigma to have to contend with.
Did we miss any terrible performance moments that derailed the Batman films, and which would be far worse than Ben Affleck could ever be in Batman Vs Superman? Share your own picks below.
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