T he key to Val Kilmer’s appeal may lie in the performance he gave in a film many think of as a throwaway, Joel Schumacher’s shiny, intentionally kitschy, and absurdly entertaining Batman Forever , from 1995. Kilmer was inheriting the Batman mask from Michael Keaton, who’d worn it, beautifully, in a duo of earlier films. This new Batman movie didn’t have the gravitas of the earlier ones. But behind that mask, which obscures roughly half of any face that’s behind it, Kilmer had turned up the