BATMAN AND ROBIN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1997 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: BATMAN AND ROBIN combines the pacing
of a Hong Kong action film with the plot depth of a
Hong Kong action film. The current chapter has
some interesting visuals if it would ever slow down
enough to let the audience appreciate them, but the
writing is the worst of any of the series. Rating:
low -1 (-4 to +4), 2 (0 to 10)
New York Critics: 2 positive, 10 negative, 12 mixed
Someone decided it was time for another Batman film. Note that this is not the same thing as saying that somebody had a good idea for a Batman story that they wanted to film. I did not say that someone was really excited about the possibilities for the Batman character and the peripheral people in Batman's life. But time has definitely passed and the cash cow was ready for another squeeze. Batman (George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) battle Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) a villain who wants to freeze the world and Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) who can make people love her, has a poison kiss, and wants to make the world safe for plants. Batman's butler Alfred (Michael Gough) is dying. Batman and Robin have a falling out over Ivy. Alfred's British niece (Alicia Silverstone) becomes Batgirl. And this plot is just one minor feature of the new BATMAN AND ROBIN! If I seem not to consider the plot very important, you should see the treatment it gets from director Joel Schumacher. The script was not ready to film and Schumacher should have rejected it. Clearly there are better things to do with the villains than to have them call the title characters "Batface and Birdbrain." Ivy was turned into a monster by being buried with some poisons for a few minutes. She comes back to life and immediately says various parts of her have been replaced by chemicals and her lips are now poison. How would she know? One sparkling line in the film has a scientist claiming to have drilled "three concentric circles" into somebody's skull.
Top-billed as Mr. Freeze is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who may be able to bench press a Buick but finds it beyond his ability to push a performance out through thick layers of blue makeup and plastic suit. The concept of a villain who fell into a freezing vat and now wants to freeze the world left me cold, and Schwarzenegger's performance is an absolute zero with none of his natural wit and far too many lamely unfunny one-liners. Physically, George Clooney looks the most like the comic book Bruce Wayne of the three actors who have played him so far, or put another way, this is the first one who looked at all the part. The problem is that Clooney is not a very exciting or even interesting actor. And if you cannot be exciting as Batman, you may just not be destined to be exciting at all. Chris O'Donnell plays Robin, the Boy Wonder who in my days of reading the comic was eternally about fourteen years old. Unfortunately it is hard to find a fourteen-year-old with marquee value. Putting O'Donnell in the role becomes an increasingly silly piece of casting each time he shows up. This leaves the BATMAN AND ROBIN wide open to be stolen by the fourth-billed Uma Thurman. Uma Thurman! How bad do three actors have to be for a decorative but dull Uma Thurman to turn in the most interesting performance? Next comes Alicia Silverstone as Barbara Wilson, soon to be Batgirl. Silverstone is a cute blonde who gets most of her personality by making funny expressions with her mouth: biting her lower lip, pouting, so forth. The script apparently calls for her to be British, but she made no attempt to sound British and nobody cared. Michael Gough, who has been in ALL FOUR Batman films turns in the most touching performance and may well be the best actor in the film.
With each new Batman film Gotham City becomes more deeply engulfed by the inevitable and all-consuming advance of Art Nouveau. The art style appears to be chewing up all the more normal-looking buildings and spitting out titanic geometric formations and baroque reliefs and statues of colossal human figures. Gotham seems unable to stem the tide, but apparently Batman has not been called. The city has gone from resembling Helsinki in the first film to being an incredible architectural nightmare in BATMAN AND ROBIN. Perhaps the one saving grace of the film is that it does bring this abstract art-form to the masses. But this combines with Stephen Goldblatt's dark photography and Dennis Virkler's fast editing. The result is a film that might be entertaining to look at if it were just a little more sparse and if the pace were cut down just a bit. But there were many scenes in which I had to ask myself what it was that I just saw.
BATMAN AND ROBIN is a sloppy and slapdash film that gets a low -1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
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