Batman and Robin (1997) A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Big, not nearly as bad as everyone had feared. Or hoped. But it's still a showcase of missed opportunities.
BATMAN AND ROBIN is hardly the worst film I've seen -- that honor right now goes to the insufferable MONEY TRAIN -- but it's like an anthology of everything that's currently wrong with popular movies. It's sprawling, expensive-looking (but fundamentally cheap), pretentiously silly, and, strangely, not a whole lot of fun. It's also easily the worst of the Batman movies in general, but that probably went without saying.
George Clooney has been cast as Batman this time around, and he feels exactly right in the role. This was something I had to work to understand, because the dialogue he's given and the situations he's forced to sleepwalk through bury him so badly. The whole movie is like a contest to see which actor or actress can do the most with the least, and there are a lot of losers: to name two, Arnold Schwartzenegger is downright embarrasing as Mr. Freeze; and Uma Thurman doesn't show any visible talent as Poison Ivy. There's an effort to give both of them deeper shades of character, but they both fall flat and are lost in the movie's explosion-in-a-prop-factory look.
Come to think of it, the movie is great to look at: the city of Gotham is rendered in an over-the-top style that could be blown up and hung on the wall as posters. There's one chase down the arm of a huge statue that stays in the memory, and the big climax is a whang-dang of a production number where Mr. Freeze uses a gigantic telescope to ice over Gotham City. (The freeze-ray effects are worth some kind of technical award.)
The bad news is that all the enjoyment we could have gotten from the lavish production design is killed, dead, by the movie's abortion of a screenplay. We spend so much time cringing at the movie's worst excesses, we don't have time to enjoy the best ones. The movie just isn't very enjoyable: it's like a desperate birthday party for little kids, where everyone runs around with forced smiles on their faces and tries to ignore the fact that nobody here really seems to be having much fun at all.
A friend once asked, "What do you expect from a movie, anyway?" Two things, I said: either that they show me something I haven't seen before, or amaze me. This movie tries to do both, and fails.
Two out of four batarangs.
syegul@ix.netcom.com EFNet IRC: GinRei http://www.io.com/~syegul another worldly device... you can crush me as I speak/write on rocks what you feel/now feel this truth =smilin' in your face, all the time wanna take your place, the BACKSTABBERS=
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