BATMAN
& ROBIN (1997)
Director: Joel Schumacher
Eastern philosophy teaches
of the yin/yang principle. We can have no good without bad, and
vice versa. That goes for just about everything, even the motion
picture industry. We need a few turkeys every so often so we'll
know a good movie when we see it. For every Casablanca,
there's a Plan 9 From Outer Space. For every Gone
With The Wind, there's a Manos: The Hands of Fate.
And for every Superman II, there's a Batman &
Robin. We've all heard the complaints about it, ranging from
"too painful to watch" to "the world's longest gay
joke." And folks, if we really need bad to go along with our
good, I don't know if this yin/yang thing is all that stellar of
an idea, because Batman & Robin is absolutely
horrible on almost every level. It's a stain on the series that
begin with Tim Burton's awesome Batman, and it even
makes the old '60s television show look like Shakespeare. But
I'll save the complaining for later, because I guess I'd better
get the plot out of the way.
We jump right into the action, with Batman
(George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) heading to a museum
robbery orchestrated by Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a new
villain in Gotham City that uses ice to his advantage. The
dynamic duo have never heard of Mr. Freeze before, but they
somehow have ice skates conveniently integrated into their boots,
allowing them to play an impromptu game of hockey with Mr.
Freeze's goons with an expensive diamond as the puck. Mr. Freeze
ends up getting away with the diamond, and we soon learn the deal
with his whole ice thing.
Y'see, two years earlier,
Mr. Freeze was Victor Fries, a scientist working to cure his
cryogenically frozen wife of a fatal disease called MacGregor's
Syndrome. His body temperature dropped to subzero levels
following a lab accident, and Fries needs diamonds to not only
power the suit that keeps him alive in room-temperature
environments, but to keep his wife's stasis tube fully
operational. And if you're gonna be a villain with a subzero body
temperature, why not use ice as a weapon and spout off corny
ice-related one-liners?
Meanwhile, in some random
South American jungle, we meet botanist Pamela Isely (Uma
Thurman), who likes plants a little too much. I don't know if
there's a term for people sexually attracted to plants, but it
would probably fit her. Dr. Isley is busy developing
"Venom," a chemical designed to help plant life. You'd
figure that a chemical designed to play nice would have a happier
name, but I'm just picking nits. But while Dr. Isley designs
Venom for the benefit of nature, colleague Dr. Jason Woodrue
(John Glover) would rather use this scientific breakthrough for
more nefarious means. With a little dash of steroids and various
other performance enhancing products, Dr. Woodrue has developed
Venom into a super-soldier serum that he plans to sell to the
highest bidder. He demonstrates on a scrawny career criminal,
pumping said criminal full of Venom and mutating him into a
400-pound masked monster named Bane (Jeep Swenson).
Dr. Isley discovers Dr.
Woodrue's transgressions, so instead of sitting down and having a
friendly discussion, he knocks her out and dumps as many
chemicals as he can onto her in an attempt to silence her. Things
don't go to well for poor Dr. Woodrue, since this doesn't kill
her as much as it transforms her. She reawakens as Poison Ivy,
the human representation of Mother Nature with raging PMS. Upon
noticing that her destroyed lab is funded by Wayne Enterprises,
Poison Ivy and her new sidekick Bane head to Gotham City and
presents Bruce Wayne with various eco-friendly ideas. He laughs
her off, pressing that Wayne Enterprises is already quite
supportive of the environment. Unfortunately, Poison Ivy doesn't
exactly see things his way, and vows that nature will get its
revenge on the uncaring human race. She uses her feminine wiles
(and a little pheromone dust for good luck) in an attempt to
force a wedge between the dynamic duo, and soon forms a
partnership with Mr. Freeze.
While all this is going on,
we're introduced to Barbara Wilson (Alicia Silverstone), the
niece of Bruce's butler Alfred (Michael Gough). Visiting from an
English prep school, she immediately strikes the fancy of young
Dick Grayson. But while she seems like a sweet, eager schoolgirl,
she soon begins swiping motorcycles from the Wayne Manor garage
to participate in underground street races. But when Dick saves
Barbara from falling off a bridge after an accident in one of her
races, she manages to drop a greta big bombshell: it turns out
dear ol' Alfred is dying, suffering from the early stages of a
rare disease called MacGregor's Syndrome. Growing sicker as time
goes by, Alfred soon entrusts Barbara with the secret of Bruce
and Dick's secret identities, and a little more too. Naming
herself Batgirl, the dynamic duo becomes a trio as Batman, Robin,
and their new teammate set out to stop Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze
from starting a new ice age and rebooting nature from square one.
Ugh... where to begin? I
just hate, hate, hate Batman & Robin. I'd rather let
Gallagher hit me in the groin with the Sledge-O-Matic than watch
this worthless waste of film, time, and brain cells. Seriously,
when the songs playing over the credits are the best part of the
movie, you know you have a problem. From silly fight scenes
(featuring out-of-place cartoon sound effects) to the
poorly-written dialogue and the generally groan-worthy campiness,
the movie is a couple of "KAPOW!" and "WAM!"
graphics away from being a modernized version of the old TV show.
While the TV show went for campiness on purpose, this particular
movie is campy for a simple lack of redeemable quality. I have no
problem with camp, because it can be fun, but it is put to
disappointing use here. And I don't know if anybody's noticed
this, but the movie's title is sort of a misnomer. It's
technically "Batman, Robin, & Batgirl,"
but I guess Warner Brothers assumed one of two things:
- "Batman,
Robin, & Batgirl" was too long of a title.
- Revealing Batgirl was
in the movie would ruin the surprise for anyone who
hadn't seen any of the commercials, pre-movie coming
attractions, cast interviews, action figures, billboards,
posters, or any other promotional material. Basically,
anybody who had been living under a rock for the six
months prior to the movie's release.
They really should have
called the movie before this one Batman & Robin and
let this one be Batman Forever, but I guess hindsight is
20/20.
Seriously, calling Batman
& Robin a disappointment is like saying the invasion of
Normandy was a friendly get-together. I don't speak any foreign
languages, but I'm certain that somewhere in the world,
"Akiva Goldsman" translates to "horrible Batman
scripts." This whole thing is just so inane and so ungodly
awful, the pages of Goldman's script would make better use as
toilet paper. The movie insults your intelligence from the
get-go. Take, for example, the scene where Batman and Robin get
into a bidding war over Poison Ivy's affection at a charity
auction. I normally wouldn't complain about her, but with the
ugly hairdo, stupid outfit, and silly leaf things on her
eyebrows, any man who would prefer Uma Thurman's company over
Elle Macpherson's deserves to be shot. On second thought, maybe
that's just the fault of the movie's wardrobe and makeup
departments. Perhaps a better example would be the opening scene.
Batman and Robin have to escape from an about-to-explode rocket,
and they elect to do so by jumping out of the rocket and riding
back down to the ground on the rocket's doors as if they were
surfboards! Why would anyone want to see Batman and Robin
air-surfing? Why not just use their capes as parachutes? The
person that thought air-surfing was a good idea needs to fire
their crack dealer, because they got hold of a bad batch. I also
don't get the reasoning behind turning a villain as awesome as
Bane into a monosyllabic sidekick. This guy nearly killed Batman
in an issue of the comics and is generally one of the cooler
members of Batman's rogues gallery, and then he's just some guy
here. But really, you could lock a group of chimpanzees in a room
with a word processor for a week, and by the time you let them
out, they'll have written the script for Batman & Robin.
You know, now that I think about it, that's probably what the
studio did. I know I made a joke about it earlier, but if it
turns out that "Akiva Goldsman" is really Hollywood
slang for "room full o' monkeys," you heard it here
first.
I absolutely hate the look
of the movie, too. Joel Schumacher may have directed three very
good movies in The Lost Boys, Falling Down, and
Phone Booth, but Batman & Robin will always
come back to bite him. The movie is just ugly to look at. I swear
on everything that's holy, if any more Batman movies have those
weird flourescent neon effects, I'm gonna go to the Warner
Brothers headquarters and kick the everloving crap out of
everyone involved. I complained about it in Batman Forever,
but it bears repeating: Do we really need the unsettling closeups
of the Dynamic Duo's posteriors and codpieces while they put on
their suits? I'm not waxing homophobic or anything, but it's just
creepy. It isn't stylish, it isn't exciting, it's just what it
is. Moving on, Elliot Goldenthal's score is okay, but it just
seems so recycled. I doubt Goldenthal did much new music for the
movie, because most of the score sounds like leftovers from Batman
Forever.
On the acting side, the
cast is just kinda bleh. Nobody really stands out except for
Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose one-liners are just so silly, the
movie is almost worth watching just to hear them. His
over-the-top performance is reminicent of something out of the
Adam West series, and the only enjoyment I got out of the movie
is watching Arnold. If you don't laugh your head off during the
scene where he serves as conductor for his singing henchmen, you
don't have a soul. But you know what? When Arnold Schwarzenegger
is the best actor in the movie, you have a problem. I like Arnold
and all, but I doubt he'll ever have to contemplate offers from
Shakespearian acting troupes. George Clooney appears as the third
Dark Knight in the four Burton/Schumacher movies, and he doesn't
seem to have the same kind of weight as Michael Keaton or Val
Kilmer. I can understand why he was cast, though, because ER
was the biggest show on television at the time and Clooney was
quickly becoming a huge superstar. On the bright side, he got to
be play one of the most recognizable superheroes ever. On the bad
side, he got to add one more movie to his already stellar
résumé, which at the time included legendary Oscar-winning
classics like Return of the Killer Tomatoes and Return
to Horror High. At least he started making better movies
after this one. And one could go as far as to argue that the
movie's failure killed the careers of Alicia Silverstone and
Chris O'Donnell. Silverstone had made a name for herself via Clueless
and three very popular Aerosmith music videos, and outside of the
extremely shortlived NBC sitcom Miss Match and a role in
Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, she hasn't really done
anything of note since Batman & Robin. And O'Donnell
is seemingly a non-factor in Hollywood now. I do think O'Donnell
made a good Robin, however. In all honesty, a little part of me
inside wishes that Warner Brothers hadn't wiped the franchise's
slate clean, because had the series kept going, they could have
easily done a spinoff featuring Nightwing. If Catwoman and Steel
could get their own movies, so could Dick Grayson.
Batman & Robin
provides a blueprint on what a Batman movie shouldn't be. And
after this flaming bag of dog doo, I don't blame Warner Brothers
for starting all over and making Batman Begins. There
wasn't anywhere to go but a complete restart, because the stink
of Batman & Robin would have been all over any other
future movies in the Burton/Schumacher era. I want to curse the
name of Joel Schumacher, but I think I should thank him. If it
weren't for Batman & Robin's horrible failure, the
Batman movies would just be more of the same. But Batman
Begins or not, I can't justify giving Batman & Robin
any rating higher than one star. The movie is
just so bad, and the only thing that makes it worth watching is
so one will see what not to do when making a superhero movie.
Final
Rating: *