The Best Bat-Men of the Moving Pictures

Yeah, yeah, yeah, simmer down. Much like the myriad blogs out there in Blogland (otherwise known as Them Thar Intarnets), I, too, have signed over my will and soul to Bat-fever, in fevered, sweaty excitement over The Dark Knight. Unfortunately, being in the part of the world I'm at right now, I am one of the few sorry saps who's yet to actually see the movie. What INSANE bat-hating part of the world could this BE, you may ask. Needless to say, 'tis a pit of fun-drained, oatmeal chewing ho-hummery where I find myself, and alas, no Bat-movie for me for a few weeks.

This post is what we in the profession refer to as "jumping on the bandwagon and sucking its bandwagon teat extremely dry". Will I even attempt to stem the tide a little bit? Will I attempt to ruffle a few feathers, make the status quo into my personal spittoon? The answer is a tepid "no". But if there's one thing the internet loves, it's a pop culture list blog with which they'll either voice avid support for, or make quick work of the blogger

We all know our movie Batmen quite well by now, hell, it's been nigh on impossible to miss any of the comparison lists springing up all over the internet with the advent of the Dark Knight. I thought I'd submit my list of favorite Bat-people too and hell, maybe surprise some folks with my choices. All entries are ordered from worst to best.

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George Clooney - Batman and Robin

No. Just a straight up no. To be fair though, it probably isn't the guy's fault that he ended up offering up a turd performance in a shitmeal that was Batman and Robin. For him, it was probably just another paycheck, so a permanent smirk on his face while producing Batskates from the soles of his boots or skyboarding out of an exploding rocket isn't out of the question. Mercifully, the movie franchise ended with his one entry, but otherwise, Clooney wouldn't have been that bad a choice to play Batman - at the very least, Bruce Wayne. Unlike Keaton or Kilmer, Clooney didn't even attempt to disguise his voice when in costume, basically achieving the same effect of Norm Mcdonald doing his "impression" of Burt Reynolds in the SNL Jeopardy parodies.

Clooney could at least move and fight in the suit they gave him, but not without looking like a Batman impersonator in LA rather than the Dark Knight himself. He just kinda looks like he dresses up in a cheap suit and does a fake fight in the middle a Chuck E. Cheese's (the movie's set design consultant, I hear) every 45 minutes, in between cigarette breaks outside and yelling at his ex-wife over the phone for more visitation rights.

Michael Keaton - Batman (1989), Batman Returns

Keaton was a decent Batman, but a lousy Bruce Wayne. He looked more like Wayne's accountant than a tortured, quiet soul with millions of dollars who uses supermodels as bedsheets by day and supervillains for boot polish by night. In fact, we probably could have gotten a decent comedy out of Keaton being a short, kinda homely looking accountant kept on the down-low by Batman to cover up his blatant embezzlement of WayneCorp funds towards numerous sundry items shaped like bats. Keaton could fight though, fake muscle suit notwithstanding. However, whenever I saw his movies as a kid, I always thought it was funny how he could never move his neck. At first I just thought it was a way of showing that Keaton's Batman was too badass to even look at you sideways while hitting you, he just knew you were there, begging for a knuckle sandwich and a vanilla punch shake. Keaton started off the movie tradition of the "Bat-voice", which, if anything else, we are all indebted to him for.

Another note: Keaton's Batman gets it on with latter day Kim Basinger and Michele Pfeiffer in a catsuit. For ass-having of such titanic magnitude, we fans offer a respectful Bat-tusi in salute.

Val Kilmer - Batman Forever

Shock! Gasp! No! Kilmer, voted higher than Keaton?! This is treason! It's Keason™! No dear readers, this isn't some sad cruel joke Firefox is playing on you (I don't know what add-ons you have installed, so who knows though?). Val Kilmer is to the Batman franchise what Pierce Brosnan was to the 007 films - a good candidate thrown into bad company. His Bat-voice was just about perfect (delivered with the same curt cadence of Keaton's), his fighting was pretty good, and he made a really tolerable Bruce Wayne. He definitely looked like he grew up in the lap of luxury, but was able to convey the whole darkness within yadda yadda bit at the same time. There is talk of a famous deleted scene from Forever which shows Wayne "accepting" his Bat persona while in a dream, which sounds like it could have lent that film the gravitas that it sadly lacked. I know the point of the film was to "lighten" the mood of the franchise a bit, but with Kilmer playing such a bang-up Batman (although a little wooden in Bruce Wayne scenes), the two combined about as well as a foot and a bear trap.

Kevin Conroy/Bruce Timm team - BatmanL The Animated Series/Adventures of Batman and Robin/Justice League/Justice League Unlimited/Batman Beyond

Now we approach a part of this list located on the corner of "fuck" and "yes". Long story short, if a man can make a character come alive simply by using his voice, that man has some serious talent. You could close your eyes, and just listen to Conroy do the Wayne and Batman voices separately, and you'll not only hear the marked difference, but also the different levels of pain and anguish housed in each identity. Wayne's voice has a tense calm about it, every now and then breaking into a relaxed tone during moments you believe he's actually trying to enjoy his life as a millionaire and not as a bat-eared borderline psychopath. However, in the Batman voice, you hear a coarse, gruff rage and even contempt, the former building during confrontations with criminals. Backed by an excellent animation and writing team, this incarnation of Batman has endured very well over the past decade. For those growing up during the 90s with half a passing fancy for anything Batman, Conroy's menacing, dark Batman will be the one these folks take home (of course, just a little less so than the last person on our list).

I just had to include two things in this section. DC recently released a straight to DVD short film called Batman: Gotham Knight, which is a collection of 6 short anime-styled films (each done by separate animation houses and written by prominent comics writers and the writer of Batman Begins himself, David Goyer), each filling in some of the gap between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Guess who they got to voice Batman in all 6 stories? Not the star of the aforementioned films, but Kevin fucking Conroy. He doesn't have that many lines in each of them, but the man is such a voice acting legend that they felt that only he could do the character justice, in a franchise tie-in featuring a whole different (and equally impressive) actor. You know Bale would have been dedicated enough to lend his voice to this project, but something tells me the Conroy choice was voluntary (plus the films are produced by Bruce Timm, so duh).

The second point is this: in my opinion, the animated series' Batman's finest moment was actually an episode of Justice League Unlimited called "A Better World" where in one scene, Batman of "regular" Earth is having a conversation/fight with Batman of "evil" Earth, most of which happens while both are concealed in shadow, so the viewer never quite knows "which" Batman is talking - so the conversation could be going either way. How badass is that? Kevin Conroy rocks so much, he'd have to square off against himself in order to get the performance of a lifetime (Mark Hamill's excellent Joker notwithstanding).

Which brings us to the obvious conclusion:

Christian Bale - Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, your dreams come true

Man, what the HELL can I say here that hasn't been said already? This man has kicked so much ass at being Batman, there aren't even asses left for him to kick on this planet any more. Rumor is that the space program is designed specifically to find extraterrestrial life and cart them over here so we'd have more asses to be kicked by Christian Bale - or at least Christian Bale's Batman. The dude buffed up from the wispy twig he was during The Machinist into basically the most believable, living breathing comic book hero this side of Christopher Reeve's Superman. Suave, sophisticated Bruce Wayne? Check. Dark, tortured soul? Check. Those wonderful toys? Check check. Ninja-trained shitkicking skills that make all the other Batmen before him look like dainty belles of the ball? CHECK my friend.

There was a nice short film that came out some years ago called Batman: Dead End which kind of came close to the kind of Batman we all deserved to see for years. The Batman in the film (played by body builder Clark Bartram) was pretty good - he had the voice, the build, but some of his fighting still seemed to come from the Michael Keaton school of stiff fighting. That movie also had a pretty good Joker, but it came off reeking of comic booky platitudes; hell, if you didn't feel that way by the time the fucking xenomorph from Alien and the fucking Predator show up, just like in those bullshit comics they try to push down our throats and some sad fat assholes still eat up for some reason, then there's no saving you. Christian Bale's Batman takes that short film's Snak Pak and gives us a turkey dinner with all the trimmings.

For those of you wondering where the hell Adam West figures on this list, look - AW will always have a special place in my heart, but only if I consider the character he played in the 60s as anything other than Batman. The show was pretty good comedic satire, and even gave us one of the greatest lines ever spoken in cinema history ("Some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb!") so I appreciated the fact that it took the source material and held a mirror up to it, but that's really its main strength. By the time West produces an actual can of Bat Shark Repellent, we're well aware that this isn't so much a Batman film as it is a bunch of drunks and acid freaks with the possession of a camera and sound equipment giving us a hell of a show. This is totally fine.