The Weird Turn Pro

Batman & Robin
1997, PG-13
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman

Eight years. Eight years from 1989 to 1997.  That’s how long it took to kill a franchise.  Welcome to the final installment in the rise and fall of the Batman.  Started by Tim Burton and Michael Keaton and ended by Joel Schumacher and George Clooney, we gather here today to mourn the hope of salvaging this franchise.  (We should also be talking about the end of Schumacher’s career but somehow that didn’t happen….)

For the fourth and final installment of this leg of the Bat-franchise we get three villains and another new Batman.  We also get the return of Robin, which I didn’t really delve into in my last review.  Oh, lest I forget we also get Batgirl.  No Batdog, but who knows where they might have gone with another movie?  As for plot, we have mad scientist Dr. Freeze (very original), whose goal is to freeze Gotham while he finances a cure for his wife.  Not sure why he couldn’t turn his freeze technologies into cash cow patents… but that would probably make too much sense.  We also get what I guess we can call an eco-terrorist called Poison Ivy.  She just seems to like plants over people.  Most days I can agree with that, but here it just seems tired.  She, in turn, has a chemically enhanced sidekick named Bane.  For fans of the comic this is an outrage.  Bane was a criminal mastermind who beats Batman to a pulp and breaks his back in the comics.  Here he is a mindless, line-less henchman.  Sad, sad, sad.  So these not-quite-bad-asses got together to freeze everyone on the planet and start over with plants.  I guess that’s the plot.  At the same time tensions rise between Batman and Robin that only the intro of Batgirl can stop.  Wayne’s butler Alfred has a niece who decides to grease herself into a bat suit conveniently hanging around for her.  Thanks, Alfred!  I’m not gonna try to sort this all out.  Half a point for plot.

Acting doesn’t get any better.  Clooney plays Wayne/Batman the same way he plays every character he’s ever done.  I know better than everyone and I’m gonna lecture—I’m sick of this act.  What a miscast.  I find it odd that Chris O’Donnell was pushing thirty when he played Robin in this flick and here’s Clooney’s Wayne treating him like a petulant teenager.  I don’t blame Robin for telling him where to stick it.  It doesn’t help that the script was written for him to come off that way.  Now, Alicia Silverstone was kind of a hot commodity at the time so she’s written in as Batgirl, the great uniter.  That leaves us with the villains.  The mad Dr. Freeze is played by… Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Yes, the terminator as a scientist.  The guy who can’t deliver a semi-coherent line.  Do I need to say more?  Well, yes I do.  The normally fine Uma Thurman played Poison Ivy, and she delivered her lines with a bad Mae West impersonation.  My god what happened?  I don’t think I want to know, I’ll just give another half a point for acting. 

This movie killed me.  The use of color and film shots makes you think you’re walking through a carnival funhouse designed by the Insane Clown Posse and the action makes you feel like you are watching a stunt show at Disney or Six Flags.  I can’t begin to describe how fake everything came across.  It’s beyond painful.  I give double zeros for both categories and give this epileptic nightmare of a film an overall .5 rating. Don’t watch this film without alcohol and a death wish.

Review by Captain Zero