Batman & Robin (1997)

BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)

A Film Review
Copyright Dragan Antulov 2003

Development of technology always represented something like double-edged sword for Hollywood. Some inventions - like sound, colour and CGI - brought huge increases of profit to movie industry, while others - like television, VCR, satellite dishes, DIVX, DVD - brought those profits down. The latest modern invention to hurt Hollywood is a cell phone, at least according to business analysts who try to explain unexpectedly bad results of Hollywood blockbusters this summer. They claim that the huge audience drop- off between the first and second day of showing is the result of young viewers sending text messages to their friends while watching the film in theatres and telling how bad the film is. If SMS hypothesis is true, it wouldn't be the first occurrence of Hollywood being hit by technologically-enhanced word of mouth. In 1997 Warner executives complained about "Internet geeks engaging in massive smearing campaign" against one of their movie. The movie in question was BATMAN AND ROBIN, directed by Joel Schumacher.

These days BATMAN AND ROBIN is known as the title that managed to kill modern-day BATMAN movies franchise. Poor commercial results, even poorer reviews and open animosity of the original fan base - all that conspired to make the fourth instalment in the series the last. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman must have been subconsciously aware of the franchise's bad prospects so he used this last opportunity to put as many subplots and characters as possible into a single movie. So, in this film the franchise's titular protagonist, millionaire and part-time crime fighter Bruce Wayne a.k.a. Batman (played by George Clooney) is going to face more problems than usual. First one is the widening rift with his sidekick Dick Grayson a.k.a. Robin the Boy Wonder (Chris O'Donnell). Second is the apparently terminal illness of their beloved butler Alfred (played by Michael Gough). Third is appearance of Alfred's niece Barbara Wilson (played by Alicia Silverstone) who wants to become Batgirl - addition to Batman-Robin team. However, all those problems are secondary to those created by two new supervillains. First is Dr. Victor Fries (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger), scientist who went insane and became Mr. Freeze, evil genius determined to turn whole world to ice and the second is Pamela Isley (played by Uma Thurman), biologist who became Poison Ivy, evil seductress determined to protect world's flora at the expense of world's fauna, including Gotham City humans.

In 1990s audience could witness the steady decrease of quality in Hollywood movies. This was due to studio executives seeing that in this modern world hype and successful marketing was more important than quality of products. Joel Schumacher, director of this film, was unfortunate enough to embrace this sad truth with religious fervour and, consequently, pay even less attention to film's quality than usual. As a result, BATMAN AND ROBIN was bad even beyond the tolerance levels of complacent moviegoer masses. Its well-deserved reputation of one of 1990s worst Hollywood movies not only killed one very successful Hollywood movie franchise, but also damaged subsequent careers of almost every major player involved in project (except George Clooney and Akiva Goldsman).

Merely naming everything that is wrong with BATMAN AND ROBIN would require encyclopaedic volumes of text. The most obvious flaws stem from Joel Schumacher raising "style over substance" principles of Hollywood filmmaking to pathological levels. Sometimes it can work and lead to campy "guilty pleasures", and sometimes not, like here, where "style" in question reflects rather questionable aesthetic criteria. The most valuable parts of the film (in

terms of money spent) are production design which gives new meaning to the phrase "architectural nightmare" and costumes that give bad name to all fetishists. (Un)fortunately, audience have little time to ponder on those details, because Schumacher, in desperate attempt to stuff as much of material into two hours of running time, treats movie as an endless series of action scenes with plenty of explosions, movement and zero coherence or sense.

Even if Akiva Goldsman's script had some semblance of quality (which, in this case, it did not), it would have mattered very little in

the end. Characters are under-developed, acting is atrocious, dialogue is lame and two of movies' supposedly charismatic villains - Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy - look like caricatures under tones of bad make-up. Things look even worse for BATMAN AND ROBIN when the movie is compared with its predecessors, including Schumacher's own BATMAN FOREVER. Fans of the original comic book and 1960s TV series would have even more reasons for complaint, but to name only fraction of them would make this review longer than the quality and importance of this film deserves.

In the end, the author of this review must say that he was once criticised by his friend for decision to watch BATMAN AND ROBIN. My friend - comic book fan who had refused to watch this film on principle - claimed that even the tiny sum paid for movie ticket would serve as justification for Hollywood to continue producing celluloid excrement. If only I and many other people had accepted such reasoning.

RATING: 1/10 (--)

Review written on August 26th 2003 Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax http://film.purger.com - Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom/Movie Reviews in Croatian

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X-RT-RatingText: 1/10