9. Schumacher's Day-Glo Gotham Gangs (Batman Forever)
Gotham's crime-rate is notoriously high, extending beyond the Super-villains and their collected goon-squads to the street gangs of the city who presumably represent enough of a threat to make night patrols by the Dark Knight and his super-hero companions a necessity. But Schumacher's Batman Forever painted an image of rampaging gangs with a penchant for day-glo face and body paint, closer to bad-tempered circus clowns than genuinely menacing hoodlums. But it's not just that the characters look terrible and are badly acted, it's that they represent something that was fundamentally broken with the art direction of Batman Forever. Because Schumacher took all of the artful work done to build Burton's Bat-universe, which typically of Burton looked great (even now there's no doubting his imagination, just his execution), and pushed it through a God-awful neon filter as some sort of statement. There's a theory that Schumacher was in some way motivated by a desire to preserve some of the cool Gothic tone of Burton's pair of films, but that he fundamentally misjudged Burton's vision, replacing artfully crafted environments with provocatively bad CGI, and that certain unquantifiable gothic essence with dark alleyways, expendable goons and luminous paint. Judging by Schumacher's subsequent artistic decisions (like the Batman & Robin costumes), he was probably just out of his creative depth.