5. "I'll Get Drive-Thru"
Val Kilmer gets a bad lot for his performance as Batman in Joel Schumacher's over-blown, but not awful Batman Forever. He was perhaps a victim of Michael Keaton's disarming success as the caped crusader, as well as Schumacher's wayward attempt to channel Burton's gothic spirit, but without the creative tools, or the restraint to do so, and his actual performance tends to be overlooked for what the film meant to the franchise in general. Kilmer's Bruce Wayne was a little too stuffy, and lacked the natural charisma that almost all of the other Batman actors - including George Clooney - brought to that side of the role, but his Batman was darker and more mysterious than Clooney's, and his line delivery was better, and less comical than Christian Bale. But Kilmer was hampered by a terrible script, which set an early precedent during the opening tooling-up sequence, with the God-awful "I'll get drive-thru" line that hung onto Kilmer's character like a bad smell for the rest of the film. It would be almost impossible to deliver that sort of throw-away, reductively comical line without sounding phoney, and so it proved for Kilmer. Not only is the delivery bad, but the line itself, with its long set-up and cheap pay-off doesn't fit the scene, or what we had come to expect of Batman in Burton's movies.