Batman & Robin

Well, I've put it off long enough, but here it is: the review of Joel Schumacher's 1997 disaster, Batman & Robin. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Clooney, Chris O'Donnell, and a completely abysmal script. This movie was just as bad as I thought it was, and possibly even worse.

The fist point I'll take off is for the terrible costumes that everybody wore. So cheesy, so over the top, so incredibly stupid. We were introduced to the new Bat costumes in the opening scene, which took time to show their butts and crotches. And don't forget about the nipples on their suits. It wasn't bad enough to have them, but they had to draw attention to them. The costumes really are a fair representation of the movie as a whole.

The opening fight scene with Mr. Freeze was also incredibly stupid. It starts with Commissioner Gordon telling Batman there's a new villain in town called Mr. Freeze, while he's in the Batmobile on his way to the museum. Once he gets there, he gets into a pretty lame fight with bad sound effects and even worse sound effects. Halfway through the battle, Batman and Robin find themselves on their backs, look at each other, nod, then click their heels to activate the ice skates that must have been sitting in his boots for years because he only just heard about Mr. Freeze a few minutes ago and couldn't have possibly had a reason to use them before.

The fight reaches a nonsensical and confusing climax that involves Batman and Robin destroying this strange rocket Mr. Freeze had and then "air surfing" out of it. This is Batman. What happened to his glider we saw in Batman Returns or something similar to it? Instead, we needed something "cooler" with the best CGI of 1997. (At least I'm assuming it was good back then.)

A full point will be taken off for the creation and treatment of Bane. We first see him in an obviously evil laboratory, being auctioned off to the Un-united Nations and a mystery bidder (who we never find out is). The stupid mad scientist explains that Bane was created with Venom and a "super soldier serum." Captain America anyone? Anyway, Bane was completely worthless during the whole movie. He never really fought Batman, didn't say hardly anything, never looked very strong or intimidating (they pushed his "turbo" button several times, which did absolutely nothing), and really just made me depressed whenever he was on screen.

The dialogue in this movie was about as bad as it could possibly be. When it wasn't being expositional, it was pun-riddled, cheesy, and just plain stupid. One particularly bad line was when Pamela Isley confronted the mad scientist about Bane. He said, "Well, I can respect your opinion, but unfortunately, I don't handle rejection well. I'm afraid you'll have to die." He then pushes her into a table filled with chemicals, from which she later emerges instantly knowing all her new abilities as Poison Ivy. By the way, in case you were wondering, she was a really terrible villain, as well.

Before I forget, I tried to keep count of every bad ice pun said by Mr. Freeze. I counted 25, but that does not include other puns he said, or ice puns other people said to him. That is quite a bit when you think about it.

Rumor has it that Patrick Stewart was the first choice to be Mr. Freeze (which would have been perfect), but he turned it down after seeing how awful the movie would be. Instead they got Arnold Schwarzenegger. To try to justify having him be Mr. Freeze, they made him a former Olympian turned Nobel Prize-winning scientist. Right ... Remember that this movie came after Mr. Freeze's origin was redone in the animated series. Here, they randomly threw in a few token scenes showing him trying to be emotional with his wife, but these were immediately discounted with the many cheesy scenes of him. One of the cheesiet was him insisting that his hockey henchmen sing the "Mr. White Christmas" song while eating frozen dinners. Why does he need them to sing? What purpose does that hold?

The Mr. Freeze conundrum brings me to the biggest flaw in this movie — the insistence of including serious scenes. The movie started with an extremely goofy tone, which dominated the film as whole, except for a few parts where it strayed from the campiness and tried to be serious and heart-warming. Mr. Freeze was bad, but Alfred was worse. If they would have cut these scenes out, then this could have been a fun movie like Adam West's Batman. But instead we had to deal with sadness of watching someone slowly die and deal with complex servant-master relationships. These scenes made the corny ones unbearable, and the corny scenes made the serious scenes feel out of place.

But there is one thing I will compliment the film on. George Clooney played a good Bruce Wayne. He is a playboy and responsible businessman. When he meets Dr. Isley, he already knows all about her experiments and the destruction of her lab. He also has a girlfriend who doesn't know his secret identity! What a novel concept! Sadly, that is the only good thing I can say about this horrible thing called a movie.

Another terrible line: When Bruce rejects Dr. Isley's extreme proposals, she gives a speech about plants taking over the world, to which an annoying lady says, "You must be new in town — Batman and Robin protect us!" Barf!

One of the worst scenes in the movie is the Poison Ivy auction scene. It's really long, random, pointless, and becomes completely unbearable when Batman pulls out his credit card with the cha-ching! sound effect. Why? Why?! WHY?!!

I was almost happy to see the return of the Glow-in-the-Dark Gang from Batman Forever. Speaking of which, this movie really is similar to the last one, but took everything that was bad from there and made it worse. The whole city is really dark, despite being overly colorful and covered with neon lights. The gigantic statues everywhere were also distracting.

Batgirl was completely terrible and pointless. The only reason I can see for them bringing her in was to have her beat up Poison Ivy because they couldn't show a boy hit a girl. They made Batgirl a computer genius, martial arts expert, and edgy motorcycle racer. The motorcycle race scene was also incredibly long and worthless. I was not impressed by the green fire, but instead found myself saying, "This is a Batman movie, where is he?"

It's also kind of sad that Batgirl isn't Jim Gordon's daughter, but it's kind of good, seeing how incredibly inept they made Gordon. He's played by Pat Hingle in all four movies, and in each movie he gets exponentially stupider.

When Alfred thinks he's going to die, he sets things up for Barbara to become Batgirl. But instead of telling her this directly, he sends her on a phony quest to find his "long-lost brother," knowing that she'd defy him and find the Batcave on her own. Good thing you trust her so much, Alfred. Anyway, it takes her forever to guess Alfred's password. Each time she puts in the wrong password, the computer says, "Access denied" in a real computer voice. But when she gets the password right, the computer says, "Access allowed" in a dramatic, happy voice. Barbara then sees Alfred's face on the big Bat computer, which tells her that he "programmed his brain algorithms into the computer." What does that even mean? Was it even necessary?

In the climactic scene at the end, Poison Ivy is defeated by being pushed onto the very plant she was sitting on not two minutes ago. That's like defeating Mr. Freeze with hypothermia. Also, Batman somehow found time to record Poison Ivy needlessly explaining that she killed Freeze's wife.

The fight with Freeze was dumb, and was made even worse with by the terrible scientists. They didn't recognize Mr. Freeze, even though it was already established that he has been all over the news. They were also annoying when they cheered Batman on. At one point they called Mr. Freeze a "dirty fighter," when I didn't see him do anything dirty. I was really kind of hoping they would die.

At the very end, Batman asked for Mr. Freeze to help him cure Alfred. Conveniently, Mr. Freeze happened to have the very cure on him at the time. I would have liked to see him suiting up for battle, then stopping, but the medicine on his arm and saying, "Just in case."

Well, technically speaking, this movie gets a score of -12. I really can't adequately describe just how bad it was. This movie did more damage to the Batman franchise than anything else. I have a feeling the next Batman movie might a little better. I can only hope.

Final score: 0 out of 10.