Batman was so successful as to make a sequel inevitable.  Director Tim Burton was back at the helm, Michael Keaton was back in the mask and an array of "guest stars" were making an appearance, including Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer and Christopher Walken.  The darkness of the original is accentuated to the nth degree and the results are rather less satisfying, though it's not the bomb it was made out to be at the time; and compared with Joel Schumacher's two further sequels, it's like Citizen Kane.

Also making a comeback was composer Danny Elfman.  Batman pretty much launched his "serious" career, and it was always going to be intriguing to see how he handled the sequel.  But he pretty much abandons the material that made the original score so fine and adopts a different approach entirely, eschewing much action for more subtle, smaller music.  It's amazing how much his style had changed in the three years since the first score - his writing here is much more confident, much more wacky and, frankly, much less enjoyable.

The big orchestral themes from the original don't make an appearance - the two villains, the Penguin and the Catwoman, are given themes after a fashion, but they're more like repeated musical ideas than old-fashioned themes - and the classic Batman theme doesn't make much of an appearance through the underscore.  Instead, we get lots of percussion, what sounds like a much smaller orchestra, and the now-familiar "la, la, la" female choir Elfman has used so many times (usually better than here).

A big problem is Shawn Murphy's recording, which is dry and makes everything sound very flat.  Another big problem is the incredible length of the album, which is seventy minutes long, far too long when there isn't really a great deal of breadth to the material on offer.  The track names are somewhat bizarre, with many pieces being indexed to two tracks on the album for no apparent reason.  Either someone was too lazy to give all the tracks names, or too pretentious.  Either way, it's somewhat confusing.

There are still some good moments in here - I do like "Batman vs the Circus" and "The Rise and Fall From Grace" - but a lot of it is just a bit too weird and unmelodic and, coupled with the comments in the previous paragraph, I find it hard to recommend.

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Tracks