Review of Batman & Robin (1997) by Alex C — 03 Jul 2016

With Joel Schumacher's role as director destroying the credibility of Batman Forever, Batman & Robin demanded my viewing simply to end the quadrilogy and for the gimmick of seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Batman movie.

Repeating himself from last time, Joel Schumacher drives that camp of Batman & Robin into absolute excess. The instant the film begins viewers are forced to bear witness to an abundance of shots focused on the crotches and butts of the titular characters as well as, for some godforsaken reasons, Batnipples on the exterior of their suits. The homoeroticism seems to be of a personal fondness to Joel Schumacher, but for the rest of us it's all just plain ridiculous. While this plays out with quick cuts against the musical score, nobody says anything until Dick Grayson complains about how he doesn't get his own car although "chicks dig them". It's immediately clear: Batman & Robin is one massive joke.

With its huge budget, Batman & Robin pushes beyond the excessive standard of camp created by Batman Forever. Quite frankly, this film is actually campier than Leslie H. Martinson's Batman: The Movie (1966) which notoriously featured Adam West, the king of camp. The fact that Joel Schumacher transcends that level of camp with a huge budget even though the Batman series' greatness was established through Tim Burton's dark and gothic approach means that the latter portion of the Batman quadriology needs to be completely separated from the good entries into two separate series that need to be segregated for everyone's sanity. Joel Schumacher is yet to come to any realization about what Batman is all about, so why anyone gave him a second chance goes beyond me.

Batman & Robin manages to fail not just a Batman film, but as a concept of any original or compelling narrative whatsoever. Not only does Joel Schumacher repeat the inappropriate tone he put into Batman Forever, but the basic plot structure of the film is the exact: There is one already established villain, one character who becomes a villain and has a rejected proposal by Bruce Wayne, and a new character introduced to fight alongside Batman. Halfway through the film when nobody is looking there is suddenly a subplot about Alfred Pennyworth suffering from MacGregor's Syndrome as the one story aspect intended to be legitimately dramatic, but there is no belief that comes with this or any emotion. There is no room to be serious in Batman & Robin because the director is obsessed with just throwing flashy colourful set pieces at audiences. Instead of black, audiences are given an abundance of electric pink and green which flashes at an endless rate in a desperate attempt to disguise the lack of a narrative in the story. Frankly, Batman & Robin is as incoherent with its narrative as with its style, so it's really the furthest thing from a Batman movie.

With this much incompetence in the writing, that leaves the actors to do nothing but struggle through the material in an attempt to use their own natural gimmicks as a hook for the film. There is no cast member who does not end up feeling the wrath of Joel Schumacher's evil.

George Clooney finds himself at a career low point in Batman & Robin, a feature which he himself has admitted to be a "waste of money". George Clooney must know the film is going to be poor calibre alongside the rest of us because his performance is ultimately a shallow and spiritless one in which he speaks with his own natural tone of voice bereft of any attempt to deepen it. He was cast entirely because he was predicted to deliver a lighter effort than Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer, and that contradicts the entire purpose of Batman in the first place. It makes no such sense, and it is clear that George Clooney is disinterested in the material because he doesn't even try. George Clooney's natural persona does not match the character whatsoever, and everybody but Joel Schumacher seems to know this. Now we're all left with a feature-length performance by him in which he uses his natural gimmick so repetitively that he essentially acts like the film is one big romantic comedy. George Clooney is miscast in Batman & Robin, and given the huge budget of the film I can only hope that his paycheck was worth it.

Chris O'Donnell returns to being an emotionless egotist for a second time in Batman & Robin. While he was excessively melodramatic in his first role as Dick Grayson, the film actually demands it from him this time. Only problem is that its for the sake of comic relief, and like the rest of the humour in the film there is nothing laughable about it. Chris O'Donnell doesn't bring any comedic virtue to Batman & Robin nor does he display enough competence to function on a dramatic level, and he offers nothing as an action hero to compensate for his charismatic shortcomings.

Alicia Silverstone similarly makes no case as to why she needs to be in the film. First off, Batgirl is an unnecesarry character who nobody thinks to do anything with in the story. She is just there for some pseudo-Feminist attempt to draw in a female audience, even though she has extremely little screen time. Second of all, Alicia Silverstone is terrible. As if she is still playing an obnoxious teenager from the Clueless (1995), Alicia Silverstone comes off as a shallow and self-obsessed generic teenager who is not believable as a superhero in the slightest. Alicia Silverstone is an annoying presence in general.

Uma Thurman's ridiculous change from over-the-top damsel in distress from the beginning of the story into Poison Ivy is not the slightest bit believable. Stranded in the shadows of the slick, sadistic and seductive Michelle Pfeiffer who portrayed Catwoman in Batman Returns (1992), Uma Thurman does not have a strong character to be working with in Batman & Robin. She never actually puts up a fight; she just attempts to seduce everyone with the same shallow gimmicks again and again. This makes for a terrible character and an example of Uma Thurman's lesser abilities as an actress on a period of endless repeat. Uma Thurman is not convincing nor appealing on any level in Batman & Robin,.

The one cast member with any sense of flair is Arnold Schwarzenegger's obsessively cheesy performance in the role of Mr. Freeze. Akiva Goldsman's obsession with ridiculous humour strands Arnold Schwarzenegger in a role which relies solely on his talent for cheesy 80's one-liners. The problem is that the 80's were over a decade ago, and this is a Batman film, and close to every single line he says is some kind of ridiculous pun. Most of them related to ice in some way. The blatant stupidity of it all is enough to give the film entertainment value in the sense that it encapsulates what is wrong with everything in the film and takes it to all new heights. Arnold Schwarzenegger takes Batman & Robin less seriously than anyone else and captures an entertaining excess of camp in the process by feeding audiences what they can expect from him, so his distinctive 80's charm adds a modicum of entertainment to the rest of the drastic mishap around him.

Batman & Robin takes the campy tone of Batman Forever to all new heights and destroys any relevance to its source material by attempting to avoid anything that is slightly dark, and it achieves no such comic or dramatic success in the process while dragging the cast down into tumultuous territory.