'Batman and Robin'
A movie review by Walter Frith
Is it just me or is there something wrong with a hero who has to bow twice in four movies to the villains in first billing? Jack Nicholson got billed first over Michael Keaton in 1989 and now Arnold Schwarzenegger has it over George Clooney.
It took at least five movies before there was a change in who would play James Bond and now we have our third actor in four movies playing Batman. Val Kilmer was nothing more than a totem pole and Michael Keaton was a better Bruce Wayne than he was Batman but Keaton is still the best at both to this point in the series.
Arnold Schwarzenegger is Mr. Freeze, a man who became a criminal after an accident occurred in his laboratory trying to develop cryogenics to freeze his terminally ill wife. Uma Thurman is Poison Ivy, a woman whose noble efforts as an environmental chemist go awry after a criminal act against her in South America causes her chemicals to work at making her an evil temptress. Both villains are bent on revenge against the system and their motivation is certainly nothing new for the criminal mind.
Simply put, 'Batman and Robin' is one of the worst films of 1997 to this point and has one of the worst screenplays I've ever seen in the history of cinema. Cliche ridden dialogue and incoherent situations are bad enough and on the technical end there is sloppy editing and badly choreographed action sequnces which are repetitive and boring. Uma Thurman does the best job with this awful movie but Arnold Schwarzenegger is laughably bad as Mr. Freeze and you won't buy his attempt at a menacing presence for a second.
Alicia Silverstone is sadly miscast as Batgirl. Her character is a cross between a girl scout and a high school student. Believing she can beat up criminals is a belly laugh in itself. Chris O'Donnell's Robin is more of a spoiled brat than a crime fighter and Clooney's Batman is sorely under written.
The first 'Superman' movie in 1978 was better than the last two Batman movies put together and Tim Burton's clever and visionary style from the first two Batman films is missing and director Joel Schumacher and writer Akiva Goldsman are academic amateurs at best.
Batman is a legendary crime fighting hero and now he is reduced to taking a back seat to light shows, computerized special effects and art direction done with over kill. Doomed from the beginning, 'Batman and Robin' is machine tooled junk.
OUT OF 5> zero
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews