Rewatch/Rewind: Batman & Robin

In which I put more effort into a single essay than anyone put into this movie.

Insert literally any line of dialogue here. It does not matter.

(Rewatch/Rewind is a feature in which I revisit a film that once made an impression on me, but I haven’t watched in at least a decade. Spoilers should be expected.)

Back in the early to mid-90s, before I became a parent and had ample free time, I went to the movies at least two to three times a week. This was long before the days of advance ticket purchases and assigned seating – often, we would just show up at a theater and see whatever happened to be playing next. At less than $5 a ticket, we could afford not to be picky. During this period, I saw Pulp Fiction five times, but I also saw a bunch of movies that don’t exist, like Blankman, and utter dog shit, like Cool World. I not only saw Ace Ventura: Pet Detective but Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.

To date, the only movie I’ve ever walked out on was Batman & Robin.

Now, to be fair, we got through more than 90% of it, so it barely counts as walking out. I thought the rubber lips scene tore it, but upon rewatching, I realized it was actually “take two of these and call me in the morning,” which was a couple of minutes later. Either way, my then-husband and I looked at each other as if to say, “Okay, that’s enough,” and made our way out of the theater. I never saw the ending until last week, when I was invited to guest on the Horror Queers¹ podcast to talk about it. Watching it again, all I can do is apologize to 25 years ago Gena: kid, you should have tapped out much sooner than that.

The best way to describe Batman & Robin is to compare it to Homer Simpson being force-fed doughnuts in Hell². The audience is strapped to a chair, helplessly waving their arms and legs around, while a machine jams bright colors and noise into their mouths faster than they can swallow. It’s an amusement park ride that leaves you running for the nearest trash can afterward. It’s the visual equivalent of having a can of Day-Glo paint t-shirt cannoned into your face by an aggressively cheerful Home Depot salesman.

There was simply no reason it shouldn’t have worked. After Batman Returns made half as much as Batman on a significantly higher budget, Warner Brothers decided that audiences had had enough of Tim Burton’s German Expressionist nightmare version of Gotham City and wanted an entirely new, more family-friendly approach. Though he had little experience directing big-budget action films, Joel Schumacher was brought on to helm Batman Forever, a flashy, self-aware take on the Caped Crusader, working with a script from journeyman screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. As opposed to Burton’s version, the villains were campy and silly, and didn’t seem capable of actual harm. This Gotham City wasn’t dim and dreary but rather a neon-lit funhouse, with no shadows to hide the bad guys.

Critics were mixed on Batman Forever, but audiences (Yr. Correspondent included) loved it, and, more importantly, it landed with kids. Believing they had a Scrooge McDuck money vault on their hands, Warner Brothers immediately ordered a sequel and demanded that the release date be changed from the usual three years between films to two. That missing year is what it would have taken to write a decent script, but we’ll get to that.

Batman & Robin was a disaster so large in scale that one person cannot be held responsible. Though Schumacher’s career never really recovered afterward, I don’t blame him. He didn’t “direct” the movie so much as oversee it. While Goldsman would later commit such crimes against the American public as writing The Da Vinci Code movies and the ill-fated adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, I don’t blame him either. He wasn’t tasked with writing a script so much as an outline. Both did the best they could with what they had, which was absolutely nothing beyond a directive of “Make more of that, but bigger and louder,” and within a considerably shorter time frame.

The film opens with close-ups of body parts encased in black rubber, in a moment that probably triggered a thousand fetishes. In keeping with the “everything bigger” demand, the nipples on Batman and Robin’s chest plates, merely prominent in Forever, are now the size of doorbells. Taking over the cowl from Val Kilmer (whose notorious offscreen shenanigans by this point resulted in directors spitting at the mere mention of his name) was George Clooney, fresh off the success of From Dusk Till Dawn. Though no one would accuse Clooney now of lacking charisma, here he’s a handsome void, so laid back he’s about to fall over. It’s impossible to say if his performance is bad or just indifferent; either way one gets the impression he did the bare minimum to avoid having to do a second take and nothing more.

In contrast, Chris O’Donnell, as Robin, is doing too much, or at least trying to. He’s been promoted to leading character status, which was a fatal error, because O’Donnell was the least charming actor of the 90s, and that’s saying a lot when you consider that’s also the same decade in which Adam Sandler starred in Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore, and Big Daddy. With all traces of the cheeky homoeroticism in Forever eliminated, there’s a rivalry between Batman and Robin, first over who gets to save the day, then later for the affections of Poison Ivy, and it’s all about as irritating as you can imagine. When he isn’t saying stuff like “Cowabunga” and “That’s gotta hurt” like someone’s pulling a string in his back, Robin is whiny and petulant, coming off more like an eighth grader being forced to go to band practice than a superhero in training. In one scene, O’Donnell, 26 at the time, looks so childishly indignant that you expect him to shout “You’re not my dad!” at Clooney and kick a wall on his way out of the room.

Not spending so much as two minutes bringing the audience up to speed, we’re dropped into a museum heist turned hockey game over a giant diamond, a scene that seems to last twenty minutes long. Here we meet Villain #1, Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who wields a freeze ray, and if that doesn’t kill you, his terrible puns will. If one were to create a drinking game every time Mr. Freeze (and several other characters) says something involving the words “ice” or “cold,” they would be in a drooling stupor before the first half hour. It’s not even clever dialogue, but either Bazooka Joe comic-level gags like “Ice to meet you” or nonsense like “Remember my name, for it is the chilling sound of your doom.” It’s no wonder the movie met with such a frosty reception from audiences and critics alike.

See what I did there? I made a better “cold” pun, and I’m not even a professional screenwriter.

ANYWAY, I’d explain Mr. Freeze’s motive, but it doesn’t really matter. Nor does it matter what the motive is for Dr. Pamela Isley, better known as Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), the second villain. If anything, their motives (one wants to encase the world in ice, the other wants to replace humans with plants) should be entirely in conflict with each other. But they team up anyway, because as amusing as Thurman often is in the role (she’s the only person who comes away from this with her dignity intact), and as much as it’s established that Poison Ivy is both brilliant and ruthless, she’s also unable to do anything without a man. Relying on either Mr. Freeze or her monosyllabic shaved ape henchman Bane (Jeep Swenson) to handle all the hard work, all she has to do is vamp and drop equally bad puns like “My garden needs tending” in a Mae West-like voice, while waggling leafy green eyebrows.

Speaking of being done no favors, Alicia Silverstone, mainly because girls are consumers too, appears as Barbara, a/k/a Batgirl. Here, instead of Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, she’s Alfred’s (Michael Gough) niece, even though Silverstone was barely 20 and Gough nearly 80 at the time. Lest you think maybe “Uncle” is a term of endearment for an elderly family friend, no, it’s explicitly mentioned several times that Alfred is the brother of Barbara’s mother, which makes Barbara an extremely late in life baby³. Mostly she’s just there to act as a potential love interest for Robin (though nothing ever comes of it) and to be another person who discovers Bruce Wayne’s secret identity. Alfred somehow anticipates that she would, as provided in some expository dialogue that required Gough to say “I programmed my brain algorithms into the Batcomputer” with a straight face.

I’d get into the barely-counts-as-a-subplot involving Alfred facing death from a rare disease that only Mr. Freeze has the cure for (resulting in the unforgivable “take two of these and call me in the morning” line), but why give it any more attention than the movie does? Even though Batman & Robin clocks in at over two hours (and oh boy, do you feel every minute of it ticking by, particularly in the final third), it wasn’t edited so much as hacked away at, as if a blind man was handed a pair of scissors and told that the film contains footage of his wife having sex with the milkman. 

There’s no sense of when or how long any of this takes place: it could be days, could be months, who cares, it doesn’t matter. There’s lots of set-ups but no payoff: when Alfred mentions a brother who’s mysteriously fallen out of communication, you expect it to turn into something, but it never does. An entire gang of fluorescent-painted thugs is living in an old building Poison Ivy turns into her secret hideout, and it seems for a moment like they might be either a possible threat or an asset to her. The gang even has a name in the end credits⁴, the Golums, but you’d only know that if you watched the end credits, because it’s never mentioned, and we never see them again.

Speaking of credits, Elle Macpherson, Vivica A. Fox and supermodel Vendela get their names in the opening credits (which usually suggests that their characters have some significance to the plot), but a combined screen time of less than five minutes. Fox gets precisely one (1) scene as Mr. Freeze’s assistant who unsuccessfully tries to cozy up to him, while Vendela, playing Mrs. Freeze, is only shown in a video, her body in stasis represented by an almost lifelike dummy. In the thankless role of another one of Bruce Wayne’s girlfriends, Macpherson should have something to do, but instead stands around for a few scenes looking like a deer caught in headlights, then disappears entirely for the rest of the movie. Did she and Bruce break up? Did she fall off the edge of the Earth, never to be seen again? “What’s my motivation, Joel?” you can hear the actors asking, to which a tired, exasperated Schumacher answers, “It doesn’t matter.” His director’s clipboard has a picture of a yacht clipped to it.

Batman & Robin isn’t a movie so much as a 130-minute toy catalog, to the point where Poison Ivy quips about having her own action figure. Every line of dialogue that isn’t a pun is either a cliché (“You break it, you buy it”), or commits the mortal sin of making you wish you were watching a better movie (“We’re gonna need a bigger cave”). One gets the impression that the producers were annoyed that they had to actually make a “movie” rather than a very long commercial, and that permeates every frame of it. What kind of greedy audience expects to see a Batarang in action before going out and buying one, anyway?

This leads me to the ultimate question: considering Batman Forever committed many of the same sins (though with a far more engaged - and engaging - cast and with much better pacing), why do I like that much better? And my honest answer is, I don’t know. It’s completely true that both movies feel the closest in spirit to the silly Adam West era than those that came before and after them. Both movies are garish cartoons, not meant in any way to be taken seriously.

And yet, there’s a cynicism to Batman & Robin that Forever doesn’t have, as though it was agreed that the target audience (comic book fans and children) required very little beyond a couple of explosions and some bright colors to be entertained. Plot, characters, and acting, all came a distant second and beyond. Now, in some ways, that’s not inaccurate. But rarely, outside of perhaps the slasher genre, does a studio produce something so openly disdainful of its audience as this. Here’s another serving of slop, folks, Warner Brothers said. Dig in and eat up.

1. If you get nothing else out of this post, then at least listen to Horror Queers, they’re great.

2. I realize Homer enjoyed it, but just go with me on this.

3. This also results in my favorite unintentional sight gag, a framed photo of Barbara’s mother that’s just some unknown actress’s headshot from the 1940s.

4. While I wouldn’t consider it a “fun” fact, one of the Golums does get a single line of dialogue, and he’s played by Doug Hutchison, who would later destroy a fruitful career of playing creeps and weasels by marrying a 16 year-old girl.