Batman & Robin
by Joel Schumacher
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Actor: Alicia Silverstone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chris O'Donnell, George Clooney, Uma ThurmanDirector: Joel Schumacher
Brand: DC Comics
Producer: Benjamin Melniker
Producer: Michael E. Uslan
Producer: Mitchell E. Dauterive
Producer: Peter Macgregor-Scott
Producer: William M. Elvin
Writer: Akiva Goldsman
Writer: Bob Kane
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 125 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-02-10
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of Batman & Robin
DVD Review: Holy mother of unintentional comedy!!!
Summary: 2 Stars
Batman and Robin. The single worst comic book movie I have seen in my life. The movie that, at the time, killed the Batman movie franchise. The movie that, symbolically speaking, took Batman's dignity, threw it on the hot asphalt, and ran over it ten thousand times with a dump truck that was filled with machine parts. And the movie that finally showed us what we had been dying to see for years; the outline of George Clooney's butt. This movie is regarded as a travesty by almost all Batman fans. Personally, I don't hate it. I know it sucks, but I don't hate it. To me, this movie is so bad, so unbelievably awful, that it is actually good. It's so stupid, that it's funny.
First, I'm going to talk about the few positive things I have to say about this movie. Or rather, the one positive thing. George Clooney. Now don't get me wrong, I agree with the statement that he is the worst Batman of all time. He was doing his best Adam West impersonation here. In fact, someone once told me that Clooney admitted that he played Batman as being gay. If that's true, then he certainly did a good job of it. Is this actually supposed to be the same character from three films ago? He's got a completely different personality. He's a different character. He's not dark and brooding any more, he's spouting lines like "That's not very PC. What about "Bat-Person" or "Bat-Woman"?". But as bad as Clooney's Batman was, I thought he did make a pretty good Bruce Wayne. In my view, it is just as important to play a good Bruce Wayne as it is to play a good Batman. Michael Keaton played a pretty good Batman, but a horrible Bruce Wayne. Val Kilmer made an almost passable Batman, but he didn't even play Bruce Wayne. He just did his Batman growl through the whole movie. George Clooney made a bad Batman, but a very good Bruce Wayne. So in my view, he gave almost as good of a performance as Keaton. Keaton and Clooney both were able to portray one part of one aspect of the character Batman very well. Clooney is probably the closest they got in this series to portraying Bruce Wayne well. Christian Bale is the first one to play a good Batman and a good Bruce Wayne, so he is better rounded than all of the previous actors. But that's a different review.
Other than Clooney's Bruce Wayne, there weren't many performances that were done very well. Chris O'Donnel returns as Robin, and man is he annoying this time around. He was a whiny jerk in the previous movie, and he's about three times as annoying as he was in "Forever". At first, he whines about how Batman doesn't trust him, and that as his partner, he should respect Robin's judgment. This starts after Robin is hit by Mr. Freeze's freeze gun. The thing is, Batman himself had almost been killed five minutes earlier, when he got trapped in Freeze's ship rocket thing. I always thought that was kind of weird. Anyway, a wedge starts to get driven between Batman and Robin. Then Poison Ivy appears on the scene. She manages to put Batman and Robin under her love spell thing, and they both fall in love with her. Batman, possessing greater strength of will than Robin, manages to break out of Ivy's spell. He deduces that Ivy is trying to kill both of them. At this point, Robin's character becomes a complete moron and thinks Bruce just wants Ivy for himself. It was a good idea to have Batman and Robin acting hostile toward each other, and then have to overcome their differences in order to defeat the bad guys. The problem is, it was handled very poorly. In the previous movie, I felt some sympathy for Robin, having just lost his family. He was struggling to accept their loss, and he was kind of funny and cocky. His character was at least somewhat enjoyable. In this, he's acting like Anakin Skywalker, whining and crying like a fifteen-year-old. Except that Robin does straighten out in the end, unlike Anakin. Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl is barely worth mentioning, because she has a very small and almost inconsequential role. She's just so wooden and uninteresting. And they really mess up her story. She's supposed to be Jim Gordon's daughter, not Alfred's niece. And what was up with that motorcycle racing subplot? Seemed kind of pointless. Her entire character didn't really add anything to the movie.
Uma Thurman plays poison Ivy, and for the role she was playing, I thought she did okay. She was supposed to be over-the-top and campy, and she does that pretty well. Some of the lines she had were genuinely funny, instead of just being stupid like Mr. Freeze's puns. She doesn't really come across as evil, which could be bad or good depending on your point of view. Obviously, they were trying to create another kid-friendly Batman movie. So they wanted her to be more like she would have been if they had put Poison Ivy on the 60s show. Uma Thurman is a decent actress, and she was just playing the role she was given. The performance that was by far the worst was that of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He went way beyond the camp of the old TV show. First of all, his suit looks ridiculous. It's too big and flashy, and it deviated way too much from what it looked like in the comics. Unlike Uma, who was just playing the role she was given, Arnold actually gave a bad performance. Not only were his stupid ice-related puns ("You're not sending me to the cooler", or "Can you be cold Batman?") reminiscent of something a fifth-grader would have written, but his delivery just seemed so off. It was like he was trying to kill the movie. Not that it needed his help for that. I know I'm just treading ground that many people have touched on before, but it wouldn't be a Batman and Robin review without a Mr. Freeze critique.
Along those lines, I won't really go into the codpiece and nipple stuff, because I just don't really feel the need. What can I possibly say about those atrocities that a million other people haven't already covered? I'll just say this: those kinds of things belong in a parody movie, like "Meet the Spartans" or "Epic Movie". Some people have tried to tell me that this is what they were trying to do with the nonetheless. This is one omovie, that the thing was actually intended as a parody of the past Batman movies. I would buy into this, except for that subplot with Alfred almost dying. I was somewhat insulted that they actually tried to tug at my heartstrings in a movie where Batman pulls out a Bat-credit-card and says "Never leave the cave without it". They were not trying to make this a comedy, they wanted to make it a serious movie. And even if they had been trying to make a comedy, this is a sequel to two very dark movies and one semi-dark movie. But whether they intended it or not, this is definitely a comedy. It's an unintentional comedy, but a comedy nonetheless. This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life, but I don't hate it. In fact, I enjoy watching it. It is simply so stupid, that it is actually funny.
Description of Batman & Robin
Cryogenic scientist gone wrong, Mr. Freeze wants to turn Gotham City into a frozen wasteland. Poison Ivy has revenge on her mind after a toxic run-in with a Wayne Enterprises scientist. While she has designs on Mr. Freeze, his cold heart is consumed only by his demented plans. With the addition of Batgirl, the dynamic duo become a trio. Will Gotham survive?Batman
Thanks to the ambitious vision of director Tim Burton, the blockbuster hit of 1989 delivers the goods despite an occasionally spotty script, giving the caped crusader a thorough overhaul in keeping with the crime fighter's evolution in DC Comics. Michael Keaton strikes just the right mood as the brooding "Dark Knight" of Gotham City; Kim Basinger plays Gotham's intrepid reporter Vicki Vale; and Jack Nicholson goes wild as the maniacal and scene-stealing Joker, who plots a takeover of the city with his lethal Smilex gas. Triumphant Oscar-winning production design by the late Anton Furst turns Batman into a visual feast, and Burton brilliantly establishes a darkly mythic approach to Batman's legacy. Danny Elfman's now-classic score propels the action with bold, muscular verve. --Jeff Shannon
Batman Returns
Tim Burton's sequel to his phenomenally successful 1989 "Batman" doesn't try to top the first picture, either with splashier special effects or with loftier pretensions to significance; nor does it simply go through the motions, repeating the surefire stuff with a self-satisfied air of professionalism. It's a blend of playful novelty and reassuring familiarity-a difficult mixture to get right. This time, the hero (again Michael Keaton) does battle with a greedy businessman named Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) and the roly-poly arch-criminal known as the Penguin (Danny DeVito). And whenever Batman ventures out on one of his nocturnal crime-fighting missions, he runs into a mysterious woman who dresses like a cat and carries a whip. The hilariously twisted relationship between the hero and the Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) plays like an apache dance in animal costumes, and it's the glory of the movie. The cat clothes seem to release something strange and wild in Pfeiffer: her performance is ferociously sexy and uninhibitedly, over-the-top funny. As in the first movie, Burton gives the material a luxurious masked-ball quality and a sly contemporary wit without violating the myth's low, cheesy comic-book origins. He's an artist who's comfortable with both the higher aspirations and the lower instincts of his nature as an entertainer: he and Batman are an ideal match.
Batman Forever
When Tim Burton and Michael Keaton announced that they'd had enough of the Batman franchise, director Joel Schumacher stepped in (with Burton as coproducer) to make this action-packed extravaganza starring Val Kilmer as the caped crusader. Batman is up against two of Gotham City's most colorful criminals, the Riddler (a role tailor-made for funnyman Jim Carrey) and the diabolical Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones), who join forces to conquer Gotham's population with a brain-draining device. Nicole Kidman plays the seductive psychologist who wants to know what makes Batman tick. Boasting a redesigned Batmobile and plenty of new Bat hardware, Batman Forever also introduces Robin the Boy Wonder (Chris O'Donnell) whose close alliance with Batman led more than a few critics to ponder the series' homoerotic subtext. No matter how you interpret it, Schumacher's take on the Batman legacy is simultaneously amusing, lavishly epic, and prone to chronic sensory overload. --Jeff Shannon
Batman & Robin
Following Val Kilmer's portrayal of the caped crusader in Batman Forever, the fourth Batman feature stars George Clooney under the pointy-eared cowl, with Chris O'Donnell returning as Robin the Boy Wonder. This time the dynamic duo is up against the nefarious Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who is bent on turning the world into an iceberg, and the slyly seductive but highly toxic Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), who wants to eliminate all animal life and turn the Earth into a gigantic greenhouse. Alicia Silverstone lends a hand as Batgirl, and Elle McPherson plays the thankless role of Batman/Bruce Wayne's fiancée. A sensory assault of dazzling colors, senseless action, and lavish sets run amok, this Batman & Robin offers an overdose of eye candy, but it is strictly for devoted Bat-o-philes. --Jeff Shannon
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