Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, is a terrible film. In fact, simply describing it as terrible does not sufficiently express just how astonishingly inept and weak it is. Its faults are layered, piled upon each other to such a depth that they effectively form entire strata of mistakes. To fully understand its multitude of sins requires multiple watches: in one viewing you will notice all of the comedy sound effects, but it takes a whole separate session to realise all of the scenes are in the wrong order. Last week Batman Forever‘s star, the actor Val Kilmer, died at the age of 65. By an appalling coincide I had already agreed to rewatch it with someone. It is a poor way to eulogise him, for which I can only apologise. It is sort of like how the makers of this film can only apologise – and honestly they should.

The film’s origins lie in an unmade third Batman film by director Tim Burton. By the time Burton and Warner Bros went their separate ways, the film had already been partially cast. While much of that cast – including Michael Keaton, Rene Russo, and Billy Dee Williams – were paid off and replaced, it left a hollow shell for Schumacher to fill when he would have been better off working from scratch. You can see that in his subsequent sequel Batman & Robin (1997) which is mad as bag of rabbits but at least has a more solid sense of its own identity. Here there are parts that feel like dangling left-overs from Burton’s abandoned work, other parts that feel like adult drama of a kind Schumacher had demonstrated in his own films like Falling Down (1993) and The Client (1994), and all of it liberally painted over with cartoon-like mayhem and colour. The problem with Batman Forever is not that it is a bad film; it is that it is multiple bad films jumbled together and reformatted to sell toys.

Kilmer does a reasonably good Bruce Wayne, but flounders as Batman because he is playing at a much lower register than he exaggerated co-stars Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones. Had Jones managed to play Two-Face in the realistic fashion of Kilmer’s Wayne, he would have likely been superb. Instead he is not simply lined up against an over-the-top comedic Jim Carrey as the Riddler, but he has either chosen or been instructed to compete. It is loud, abrasive, and not entirely watchable.

Nicole Kidman is essentially thrown under a bus by an edit that removed 40 minutes of plot in favour of whatever stimulated the eyes the most. It makes a mockery of her character, and ensures whatever creative decisions she made in her performance were redundant. The edit transforms her from competent psychologist turned sexually available temptress into its exact opposite: a sex-positive obsessive who happens to moonlight as a therapist from time to time.

What has surprised me over time is how Joel Schumacher’s fetishization of the material – rubber suits with nipples, pierced goons in gimp masks and so on – has fully shifted in my eyes. Upon release it was one of my least favourite elements, and seemed to make a mockery of the character and his surroundings. 30 years on, and it is now the element I like the best: in a film torn between old and new masters, studio interference, and emphasis on marketability, it feels both wonderfully subversive and the only honest creative element it has.

As one of Kilmer’s biggest commercial hits, Batman Forever has been mentioned quite a lot in the past week. It is understandable but also depressing – who would want their career to be remembered for this?