Sam Hamm

Sam Hamm, who contributed to the script and story for Tim Burton's two Batman movies, spins an alternate sequel to replace the generally reviled Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.

Michael Keaton's very white Bruce Wayne flounders around in a story about race relations and police brutality that sees Billy Dee Williams' Harvey Dent finally getting his chance to be Two-Face (Nuts to you, Tommy Lee Jones!) when some white supremacists wearing Batman logos commit arson. Batman spends more time dogging after the Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman than chasing Two-Face, but that's okay, because there's a new Robin on hand to carry the weight, and he sure isn't Chris O'Donnell.

The story is a boring muddle -- and I really could have done without a couple of severely stupid dream sequences -- but a project like this really hangs on capturing the likenesses of the original actors and the design aesthetic of Burton's Gotham, and while Joe Quinones gets close, he doesn't quite clinch the job.… (mer)

Bruce Wayne inadvertently stumbles upon a nefarious mind-control experiment going on behind closed doors at WayneTech and before he knows it, his secret identity as Batman is at risk. What can Bruce do to save the day - and himself?

For the life of me, I can't remember now why I decided to seek this book out, but I am glad I did. This book was presented for the 50th anniversary of the Batman character's debut and was written by Sam Hamm, the screenwriter behind 1989's Batman movie. (Unlike the movie, this was a multi-layered, complex book with deeper themes explored underneath the ongoing action.) Hamm notes in the introduction that he was interested in taking an outsider's approach to the Batman character, studying Bruce Wayne's motivations obsessively. The result is a book that is peppered with moments of Bruce recalling and/or being haunted by his past as he wrestles with difficult decisions in his present.

Meanwhile, the book begins with a satisfying mystery containing a number of what at first seem like unrelated threads that ultimately come together to form a cohesive whole. There are numerous characters in this book but not so many that the story becomes unmanageable. Unlike with so many Batman books, we only hear a passing reference to ongoing villains like the Joker. Instead, we are presented with a more insidious evil plot that goes on right beneath Bruce's nose while he's out and about fighting off more typical (i.e., flashy) comic book villains.

In this book, we learn more about what Bruce was up to in the years after he left Wayne Manor as a grief-stricken young man and before he returned as the Batman. There's nothing too earth-shattering here for the modern audience, but some of this was new at the time of publication. The illustrations in this book are interesting - not as high-quality glossy and vivid as some current graphic series but definitely leaning more toward the realistic side than the cartoonish. Despite its age and the occasional ridiculous throwback (like the giant shoulder pads in Jeannie's outfits), this book holds up pretty well as an entertaining and quick read.… (mer)

I've never been a huge fan of novelizations of movies. Books becoming movies I understand fully, movies becoming books, that are the exact same as the movie and not a continuation or a tie-in, seem unnecessary. On occasion they can add some element of the mental state of the characters not revealed in the movie or help explain some detail not dealt with in the film the way it should have been. Sometimes there are even differences in the book due to it coming from an earlier version of the script or due to a change during the production of the film. This is not one of them.

This is a direct copy of the movie. Nothing new covered. It's entertaining, but the movie is a better way to spend your time, warts and all.… (mer)