F | Batman and Robin fend off a series of ice puns and a horny plant-woman. Directed by Joel Schumacher Starring George Clooney, Chris O'Donnell, and Arnold Schwarzenegger Review by Jon Kissel |
On our master spreadsheet, a movie gets a ranking after 3 people have graded it. We’ve currently logged 4,226 movies, but only 1721 have been ranked. Six movies have received only F’s, and of those six, Batman and Robin has been given an F by eight Mediocre Movie Club members. By consensus, this is the worst movie we’ve logged in the nine years we’ve been doing this. The fourth film in a franchise that’s turned over its entire cast three times, with the exception of Michael Gough as Alfred, Batman and Robin is what it looks like when everyone has given up and surrendered whatever artistic or technical aspirations they have to greed and apathy. No one appears to be trying to make something acceptable. Joel Schumacher buries Batman and resets the superhero genre back to square one in the public’s eyes as a clownish and juvenile endeavor. That wouldn’t last longer than a few years with X-Men and a 9/11-goosed Spider-Man, but it’s not like Schumacher and Co don’t shovel as much dirt on the corpse as possible. Critically reviled movies often come in for a reevaluation years after their release, but Batman and Robin doesn’t achieve some kind of camp quality, nor is it a scrappy underdog. It was bad then, and it’s bad now.
The writer of Batman and Robin has an Oscar. Akiva Goldsman would go on to win Best Adapted Screenplay for A Beautiful Mind, but four years earlier, he was getting marching orders from a mercenary union between Warner Bros and toy companies who demanded that the film be even more ‘toyetic’ than earlier entries. Goldsman and Schumacher probably had no chance of success, and seem to have served up exactly what their paymasters wanted. New characters that can be turned into new action figures, new sets that look artificial and plastic and can therefore be easily miniaturized for the big-spending parent. Batman and Robin’s greatest failing is that because it’s not aiming for anything other than downstream commerce, it becomes boring. I fell asleep with twenty minutes to go and struggled to remember which interminable phase of the finale I left off at.
The most charitable stance towards Batman and Robin is that it’s a throwback to the silly roots of the Adam West series. That would require any part of this film to be fun. Camp requires commitment to the bit, or even better, not knowing that the bit exists in the first place. Commitment is a pipe dream here. There’s not a single redemptive moment for any of the actors, partly because of the braindead material they’re given and partly because they can’t elevate what little there is. George Clooney has never been worse, nor has his eyes-down-and-then-up acting shortcut been more apparent. To his credit, he’s acknowledged this to be the case in interviews. Chris O’Donnell and Alicia Silverstone are sleep-walking, and Arnold Schwarzeneggar is making a fool of himself with nonstop ice puns. Uma Thurman comes off the best through force of will, turning her horribly written character into the closest version of acceptable that was possible, but that’s not saying much.
It’s not like the general crappiness of Batman and Robin ends with the writing and the acting. The production design, so memorably established by Tim Burton in the earlier entries, looks like a shoddy theme park. The choreography is held captive by an instruction to grab the Mountain Dew extreme sports crowd, so everything’s on skates. The cinematography breaks with movie logic (who’s filming these Freeze home videos) while also falling back on hacky Dutch angles. Poison Ivy’s costume has strands of ivy tucked into her leotard, which itself looks like it came out of a JC Penney’s discount bin. No one is trying, and the result is a stain on the entire cast and crew’s resume. An F is usually saved for a movie that makes me angry. Batman and Robin earns that grade despite being too empty to generate any feeling at all. F
The most charitable stance towards Batman and Robin is that it’s a throwback to the silly roots of the Adam West series. That would require any part of this film to be fun. Camp requires commitment to the bit, or even better, not knowing that the bit exists in the first place. Commitment is a pipe dream here. There’s not a single redemptive moment for any of the actors, partly because of the braindead material they’re given and partly because they can’t elevate what little there is. George Clooney has never been worse, nor has his eyes-down-and-then-up acting shortcut been more apparent. To his credit, he’s acknowledged this to be the case in interviews. Chris O’Donnell and Alicia Silverstone are sleep-walking, and Arnold Schwarzeneggar is making a fool of himself with nonstop ice puns. Uma Thurman comes off the best through force of will, turning her horribly written character into the closest version of acceptable that was possible, but that’s not saying much.
It’s not like the general crappiness of Batman and Robin ends with the writing and the acting. The production design, so memorably established by Tim Burton in the earlier entries, looks like a shoddy theme park. The choreography is held captive by an instruction to grab the Mountain Dew extreme sports crowd, so everything’s on skates. The cinematography breaks with movie logic (who’s filming these Freeze home videos) while also falling back on hacky Dutch angles. Poison Ivy’s costume has strands of ivy tucked into her leotard, which itself looks like it came out of a JC Penney’s discount bin. No one is trying, and the result is a stain on the entire cast and crew’s resume. An F is usually saved for a movie that makes me angry. Batman and Robin earns that grade despite being too empty to generate any feeling at all. F
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