1. Val Kilmer/George Clooney - Batman
There are a lot of people out there who hate the idea of Val Kilmer having ever played Batman, bu for my money, he's one of the only actors to make the character rather interesting: he doesn't butcher Bruce Wayne, not does he make him dull. Whether or not you think
Batman Forever is the biggest load of around or not (it is), I don't think Kilmer did a bad job doning the Batsuit. In this case, his performance is brought down by everything else around him - that is, the script, the direction, his co-stars and the all-round general awfulness. Val Kilmer decided that he didn't want to come back for another round as Bruce Wayne (I wonder why?), so the producers decided to take a risk with George Clooney for the sequel. Don't get me wrong: I love George Clooney, and I think he's a huge talent. Was he a terrible replacement for Kilmer, though? Entirely. Again, it's hard to judge the man's performance on its own merit when you've got
Batman & Robin going on around him, but Clooney plays Batman too cool, too self-aware, too ironic and too detached. It's kind of cringeworthy to watch. And yet if Kilmer had been given a better script and a little more room to interpret the character, there's no telling what he could have done in these iconic boots. He feels a lot
like Batman, at least, which ol' George doesn't. I think it was Bob Kane (just one of the creators of Batman, no worries) who said that Val Kilmer was his favourite Batman, and the most like how he envisioned the character being as a real person. So I'll end on that point, I think, because it does a lot of the work for me: Val Kilmer good, George Clooney bad.
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