Subject: REVIEW: BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)

From: [email-masked] (Mark R. Leeper)
Date: 30 Jun 1997 23:50:47 GMT

BATMAN AND ROBIN
                      A film review by Mark R. Leeper
                       Copyright 1997 Mark R. Leeper

               Capsule: BATMAN AND ROBIN combines the pacing
          of a Hong Kong action film with the plot depth of a
          Hong Kong action film.  The current chapter has
          some interesting visuals if it would ever slow down
          enough to let the audience appreciate them, but the
          writing is the worst of any of the series.  Rating:
          low -1 (-4 to +4), 2 (0 to 10)
          New York Critics: 2 positive, 10 negative, 12 mixed

     Someone decided it was time for another Batman film.  Note that
this is not the same thing as saying that somebody had a good idea for
a Batman story that they wanted to film.  I did not say that someone
was really excited about the possibilities for the Batman character and
the peripheral people in Batman's life.  But time has definitely passed
and the cash cow was ready for another squeeze.  Batman (George
Clooney) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) battle Mr. Freeze (Arnold
Schwarzenegger) a villain who wants to freeze the world and Poison Ivy
(Uma Thurman) who can make people love her, has a poison kiss, and
wants to make the world safe for plants.  Batman's butler Alfred
(Michael Gough) is dying.  Batman and Robin have a falling out over
Ivy.  Alfred's British niece (Alicia Silverstone) becomes Batgirl.  And
this plot is just one minor feature of the new BATMAN AND ROBIN!  If I
seem not to consider the plot very important, you should see the
treatment it gets from director Joel Schumacher.  The script was not
ready to film and Schumacher should have rejected it.  Clearly there
are better things to do with the villains than to have them call the
title characters "Batface and Birdbrain."  Ivy was turned into a
monster by being buried with some poisons for a few minutes.  She comes
back to life and immediately says various parts of her have been
replaced by chemicals and her lips are now poison.  How would she know?
One sparkling line in the film has a scientist claiming to have drilled
"three concentric circles" into somebody's skull.

     Top-billed as Mr. Freeze is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who may be able
to bench press a Buick but finds it beyond his ability to push a
performance out through thick layers of blue makeup and plastic suit.
The concept of a villain who fell into a freezing vat and now wants to
freeze the world left me cold, and Schwarzenegger's performance is an
absolute zero with none of his natural wit and far too many lamely
unfunny one-liners.  Physically, George Clooney looks the most like the
comic book Bruce Wayne of the three actors who have played him so far,
or put another way, this is the first one who looked at all the part.
The problem is that Clooney is not a very exciting or even interesting
actor.  And if you cannot be exciting as Batman, you may just not be
destined to be exciting at all.  Chris O'Donnell plays Robin, the Boy
Wonder who in my days of reading the comic was eternally about fourteen
years old.  Unfortunately it is hard to find a fourteen-year-old with
marquee value.  Putting O'Donnell in the role becomes an increasingly
silly piece of casting each time he shows up.  This leaves the BATMAN
AND ROBIN wide open to be stolen by the fourth-billed Uma Thurman.  Uma
Thurman!  How bad do three actors have to be for a decorative but dull
Uma Thurman to turn in the most interesting performance?  Next comes
Alicia Silverstone as Barbara Wilson, soon to be Batgirl.  Silverstone
is a cute blonde who gets most of her personality by making funny
expressions with her mouth: biting her lower lip, pouting, so forth.
The script apparently calls for her to be British, but she made no
attempt to sound British and nobody cared.  Michael Gough, who has been
in ALL FOUR Batman films turns in the most touching performance and may
well be the best actor in the film.

     With each new Batman film Gotham City becomes more deeply engulfed
by the inevitable and all-consuming advance of Art Nouveau.  The art
style appears to be chewing up all the more normal-looking buildings
and spitting out titanic geometric formations and baroque reliefs and
statues of colossal human figures.  Gotham seems unable to stem the
tide, but apparently Batman has not been called.  The city has gone
from resembling Helsinki in the first film to being an incredible
architectural nightmare in BATMAN AND ROBIN.  Perhaps the one saving
grace of the film is that it does bring this abstract art-form to the
masses.  But this combines with Stephen Goldblatt's dark photography
and Dennis Virkler's fast editing.  The result is a film that might be
entertaining to look at if it were just a little more sparse and if the
pace were cut down just a bit.  But there were many scenes in which I
had to ask myself what it was that I just saw.

     BATMAN AND ROBIN is a sloppy and slapdash film that gets a low -1
on the -4 to +4 scale.

					Mark R. Leeper
					[email-masked]