IMDb user comments for
Batman & Robin (1997)

photos

board

trailer

details

7 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
From Dark Knight To Boogie Knight, 10 September 2005

Author: dunmore_ego from Los Angeles, California

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Why does George Clooney waggle his head like that when he talks?...

Robin met Batman when Batman was Val Kilmer. One day he wakes up and Batman is *another* Hollywood Man-Toy, the smug head-waggler Clooney. And Alfred, in seeing no less than three batmen pass through his hallowed Wayne Manor, probably puts it down to his spiraling Alzheimer's…

It is strangely ironic that the major complaint with this "Batman" is that it resembles a comic book – let's all step back from our sophisticated bad selves for a moment, folks… Batman IS a comic book. It is doubly ironic that modern comic books exhibit a more cogent view of "reality" - since Batman's inception in 1939 - than that which director Schumacher opted to portray in this sophomoric film, which harks back to the inglorious camp of the 1960's TV series, much maligned by aficionados of the "brooding Batman" persona.

And in camping it up, Schumacher seemed oblivious on where to draw the line: primary colors shriek in anguish and gobos coruscate like an LSD afternoon delight (I assume that the DISCO BALL in the Batmobile's engine means Batman has "Knight" Fever-?); humanly impossible feats of acrobatism abound, contravening every physics principle mankind has worked so hard to identify; everyone speaks simply and directly ("Freeze – you're mad!", "She's definitely evil!", "She loves me and not you, and it's driving you crazy", "I was the one who kicked Ivy's butt. Yeh, that was me" – gems, one and all) with lowbrow puns constituting over 80 percent of the egregious dialog; henchmen and policemen as widespread as buffalo on an Oregon plain – and just as dispensably bovine; all that's missing are the "Kapow's" and "Blammo's"…

Stupidity runs rampant in this movie, so outlining the plot may seem like an exercise wasted: Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Mr. Freeze (who becomes "bad" after falling into a vat of cryogenic solution – er, okay), bewilderingly reaches the conclusion he will find a cure for his frozen wife by flash-freezing Gotham City. Ah, the Republican mind at work: like George W. Bush's plan of furthering education for American children by blowing up Iraqi children. Meanwhile, Uma Thurman (playing Poison Ivy like she's on the brink of constant orgasm) seeks to over-run the planet with her horticulture. With the Rubber-Butted Duo to the rescue...

We all know that Arnold can't act – but who knew he couldn't even OVER-act? And Thurman, for all her pining and puling, is a lesson in blandness. That doesn't quell the writers relentlessly plying these two monotone villains with exquisitely-painful puns, eliciting uncomfortable throat-clearing in the stead of guffaws. Place them beside the traffic-stopping vapidness of Chris O'Donnell (Robin) and the plump insipidness of Alicia Silverstone (Batgirl), whose lips look like two oysters doing battle and whose costumed bosom is as unnaturally rounded as Janet Leigh's was unnaturally pointed, and we have a cast as formidable as any ensemble from a "Police Academy" stink-bomb.

Resembling a comic book is not a crime (illustrated by the superb visualization of Frank Miller's "Sin City"); insulting our intelligence is what earned Schumacher's Batman the prize in banality. Of the thousands of gaffes that litter the movie, one of the most galling is when Batman shows Freeze incriminating footage of Ivy admitting she was Mrs. Freeze's would-be killer. During that admission, Ivy had dispatched Robin with a gentle push into a two-foot-deep wading pool, Batman was tangled in vines near the ceiling and Ivy was busy kicking Batgirl's portly butt. Yet the Bat-Palm-Pilot simply replays footage FROM THIS MOVIE, not even *trying* to re-create any "hidden-camera" authenticity.

Insults in no discernible order: an observatory built in the heart of the glaring city (idiotic location choice from the outset – but during the film's climax, it is suddenly atop a million-foot precipice); upon Batgirl's first appearance, she larks at Batman, "Bruce it's me – Barbara!" – oh, sorry, that meager strip of mask which covers virtually zero percentage of your face had me irretrievably flummoxed; Batman and Robin spending most of the second act feebly arguing over Poison Ivy's attentions, in a vain attempt at dispelling their image as the original Ambiguously Gay Duo; Gotham Telescope crashing to the ground and exploding, obviously due to the vast poundage of explosive material that telescopes are made out of…

Schumacher – just – didn't – care.

When dying Alfred entrusts Silverstone with a "sacred trust" DVD for his brother, imploring her never to open it – though it is annoying enough that she immediately *opens it* – upon discovering the secrets of the Bat-Catalog, she apparently assimilates the complete Bat-Crimefighter Protocol in one evening, as she turns up to get her butt kicked by Ivy shortly thereafter, in her XXL Bat-Couture. Then – to further the idiocy – Batman, who for most of the movie has been badgering Robin (the professional acrobat) about being unprepared for battle, nonchalantly allows the out-of-shape college student Batgirl (who has spent just one evening cramming the Batalog into her blond brain) to participate in life-threatening battle with super-villains. Now *that's* a responsible guardian!

By the end of the movie, the costuming on the three heroes is so garishly superfluous, so clinically hedonistic, so tastefully atrocious, that it goes way past eye-candy and directly to eye-myocardial-infarction, Clooney's costume neck-bracing him like a stockaded rodeo bull, silver highlights transversely swirling over pecs and quadriceps and Achilles-tendon – one imagines he must feel intoxicatingly liberated when he is free of that constricting cowl, as Bruce Wayne; to dance and sing and compose odes to peripheral vision…

…I guess that's why he waggles his head like that.

(Movie Maniacs, visit: www.poffysmoviemania.com)

Add another comment

Related Links