Review of Batman & Robin (1997) by Joseph%20 M — 08 Dec 2018

A movie so famously awful that it tainted careers, offended fans, wasted money, killed a franchise and created a legacy as one of the worst films ever made, Batman & Robin is a truly head scratching experience.

Much of the blame has fallen on Joel Schumacher, and his unsubtle, cartoony approach certainly didn't help, but studio interference is rife throughout. Dumbing it down and brightening it up makes it marketable to children, and the selection of colourful characters means lucrative merchandising opportunities.

See the Pixar film Cars for reference. The movie itself is 2+ hours of garish aesthetics, Dutch angles for absolutely no reason, a metric tonne of bad puns and a selection of actors completely phoning it in.

When a performance or 2 is bad, its fair to blame the actors. When all of them are bad, it's a fault that lies with the director. The actors read their dreadful line not with disdain as in many bad movies, but with puzzlement.

What's weird about the screenplay is that it feels like the kind of thing you would get in a comic. Lines about maniacal baddies and taking over or destroying the world are right at home in big white speech bubbles at the corner of comic book panels.

These lines look cool on paper but prove to be completely unsayable on screen. Watching Uma Thurman scolding her boss for being evil and threatening revenge on him is simply painful to watch. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a screen legend but no Lawrence Olivier, is worse than ever, speaking many of his lines like he learned them phonetically, but he does seem to enjoy spouting those infamous ice puns.

The plot is full of gaping holes, the fight choreography is laughably bad, as is the CGI, and there's very few points where it actually feels like a Batman movie. It's great that some of its cast managed to survive the ordeal and went on to better things, but some of them would never be the same again.

Batman & Robin is, for better or worse, a landmark picture. The nadir of a once reputable franchise and so toxic that it killed any whisper of the caped crusader for 8 years, and any mention of his whiney sidekick for almost twice that time.