Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

  • Year:  1993
  • Director:  Eric Radomski  /  Bruce W. Timm
  • Series Rank:  #7
  • Year Rank:  #38
  • Oscar Nominations:  none
  • Nighthawk Nominations:  none
  • Batman Villains:  Mark Hamill (Joker), Hart Bochner (Arthur Reeves)
  • Love Interest:  Dana Delaney  (Andrea Beaumont)
  • Batman Allies:  Efrem Zimbalist, Jr (Alfred), Bob Hastings (Commissioner Gordon)

When I was in college, there was a successful wrestler at my school that I knew who was built oddly.  He had this enormous upper body and these scrawny little legs.  It is a look that a lot of animators like to give to their characters (which has roots in the comics themselves when drawn by such people as Rob Liefeld) and I’m not fond of it.  It is the look of Batman specifically in this film, as it was in the Batman Animated series which was critically acclaimed but I didn’t watch because I was in college and was watching hardly any television.  The show was a huge hit and given the noir feel of the show, that was understandable.  The film also has a lot of critical acclaim and I have a harder time understanding that.  It was thrown into theaters in the years between Keaton taking off the mask and Kilmer putting it on and most people didn’t seem to notice as it quickly died at the box office (it made just over $5 million when every Batman live-action film was taking in at least $40 million on opening weekend alone).

To be certain, there are good things about this film.  The first is the look and the feel.  Even if I don’t like the way Batman’s top half is so much larger than the rest of his body, the rest of the show looks good.  It has that dark look that was such a key component to the critical acclaim heaped on the show and this Gotham, unlike Anton Furst’s, actually has things that go places.  And it reminds us that Batman is first and foremost a detective and it provides a noir feel to the film.

But there are several things in the film that I really don’t care too much for, some of which would have been a problem for me watching the show and some of which are obviously just a problem within this movie itself.  The problem tied into the show is the voice acting.  Kevin Conroy is okay as Batman, though he is let down by a very weak script (more on that later).  But I was unimpressed with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr as Alfred and I thought Bob Hastings as Commissioner Gordon was simply terrible.  But you needed to bring these actors in because they were voices from the show.  Just because this was getting a theatrical release didn’t mean that they were going to up the budget for bigger name voices.  Joining them in the subpar department are Dana Delaney as Andrea Beaumont (who? you might say – more on that later as well) and Hart Bochner as Councilman Reeves.

Now that I’ve mentioned those last two it’s time to begin dealing with the real issue in this film.  This film uses a really tired trope that I had planned to complain about in a Reading Guide I meant to put up before I began the series but forgot and ran out of time, the trope of introducing as supposed long lost person from the character’s past that was by far the weakest point of Hush, one of the great Batman storylines in the comics.  Comic books, because of years of continuity are especially bad at doing this and Batman has been no exception through the years.  But this one really lets the film down.  The basic storyline is that someone is killing crime bosses at the same time that Andrea, the long lost love from Bruce’s college days reappears in his life.  Andrea’s presence almost made Bruce decide to forgo fighting crime in the first place and that storyline isn’t believable at all, especially given how much the characters are let down by the cliched script and the voice acting performances.

So now that Andrea is back, along with a city councilman who has been pressing for Batman’s arrest (and bears a resemblance to the Riddler, which always made me think they might go in that direction) we have to wonder who is the mysterious cloaked figure who is killing off the gangsters.  Is it the councilman who hates Batman and might want to frame him and is connected to the gangsters through Andrea and her father?  Is it Andrea’s father who has been hidden for years since these self-same gangsters tried to kill him?  There are elements here of Batman: Year Two, an under-appreciated storyline that would hint at Andrea’s father.  Is it perhaps the Joker, putting in a crazy move because he’s a psychotic lunatic?

The problem is that you can’t really bring yourself to care too much.  Andrea is a character clearly created just for this film and won’t have any lasting importance.  And she shouldn’t because she’s shoe-horned into Bruce’s past (and quickly figures out his identity because for some reason in this film the Waynes aren’t buried at Wayne Manor) and is badly written.  She’s the villain (sorry, spoiler) because she’s gotten some kind of technology but by the time we got to that I was long past caring.

So why isn’t this film terrible?  After all, I have it at mid ***.  Well, it’s because of two things.  The first is that the movie is well-animated even if I don’t care for the huge top half, scrawny legs style of animation.  The second is that, as you may have noticed, the Joker is in this film, which means we get that fantastic Mark Hamill take on the Joker that had been such a big selling point of the television series.  Hamill’s voice-acting is really better than everyone else in the film combined and because he’s the Joker, you’re never quite sure exactly what he might do.  He could be the mysterious killer.  He could be the hero.  You just never know and that’s because Hamill plays it so well.  If you’re going to watch an animated film starring Batman you could do a lot better but you could also do a lot worse (and with two animated films left in the series, we will do both).