4. Michael Keaton
Tim Burton’s two Batman movies – Batman and Batman Returns – are typical of the director: they’re dark, gothic, and quirky, but they’re also clever and fun. With Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader, Batman brought the character into the modern age of cinema, adapting the brooding darkness so often present in the comics to the screen in a way that many had considered impossible. Burton’s movies touched on Batman’s dual nature, albeit without directly exploring his origins, adding a sense of mystery to Keaton’s version of Batman that worked both for and against him.
There’s a zany darkness to Burton’s movies that make Keaton’s Batman feel vaguely blasphemous to the character’s canon – they even killed the Joker in one of the most pointless and frustrating deaths in cinematic history. However, the biggest weakness of Keaton’s Batman is the actor’s physical qualities: while he’s an excellent actor and leading man, he simply isn’t particularly imposing. This is fine when he’s playing Bruce Wayne, but his Batman simply isn’t fearful or intimidating enough, and that’s the only real reason why he falls short of other versions of the character.
This issue is compounded by the occasionally wacky nature of Burton’s world. It feels something like a comic come to life, and that leads to an atmosphere where none of it matters: the Joker dies, the Penguin is literally a sewer mutant, and Catwoman physically dies multiple times, so why should Batman really matter? The factors on which Keaton’s Batman is marked down aren’t the actor’s fault in the slightest, and his version of the character remains excellent even decades on, but there are still components that stop him from topping the list.