Freeze still stinks, but some of the tasteless spectacle was prophetic.
Every week from now untilThe Batmanhits theaters, we’re watching Batman’s theatrical films in chronological order.
This week: The plant lady cometh, now streaming on Hulu.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman as Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy in ‘Batman & Robin’.Christine Loss/Warner Bros.
Last week:Orgasmic rubber nipples.
See you next Waynesday, when the beginning re-begins.
He’s not the only problem with the 1997 flop.
‘Batman & Robin’ stars Alicia Silverstone, George Clooney, and Chris O’Donnell.Warner Bros.
But many of its catastrophes are now defensible, if not celebrated.
Joel Schumacheroutlandished his Dynamic Duo’s world.
And costume designers Ingrid Ferrin and Robert Turturice lathered every uniform with three layers of exoskeletal flair.
Pat Hingle (seated second from right) as Commissioner Gordon in 1989’s ‘Batman’.Warner Bros.
Nicky Katt plays Spike, a deathbike marauder wearing flagrant lipstick beneath red-black eyeshadow.
There is a puffy yellow mohawk on his helmet, and his leather jacket pokes out stalagmite shoulders.
He looks likeSuper Street Fighter II Turbosmelled.
Commissioner Gordon (Pat Hingle), holding the diamonds at a Gotham City gala in ‘Batman & Robin’.Warner Bros.
There’s no coherent sense of space, and did somebody say Coolio?
Schumacher was gay, and theBatman & Robinreconstruction project depends on tantalizing subtext.
Subversion gives a free pass to incoherence, and our century loves treasure-hunting last century’s secret queer history.
Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) resembles a drag queen.
That would’ve been a conventional insult in the horrible 1990s, but I mean it as a compliment.
(Let’s finally make hair horns happen!)
“I’m not the marrying kind,” Bruce tells her.
“There are things about me you wouldn’t understand.”
Is this even subtext?
Because Ivy cares about climate change, she will soon be the story’s only recognizable hero.
“Forget the stars, look here to earth!”
she pleads with Bruce Wayne (George Clooney) as he bankrolls a new space project.
“You spoil her lands, poison her oceans, blacken her skies.
You’re killing her!”
The people of Gotham cackle when Ivy promises “a day of reckoning.”
Viewed today, that laugh sounds like the firestorm outside your window.
DoesBatman & Robindeserve to be rescued?
Clooney built his second act by disowning it.
The late Schumacher sounds nonchalant but defensive in his DVD commentary.
He insists he wanted to adaptBatman: Year One, the acclaimed Frank Miller-David Mazzucchelli gutter battle book.
This was the political thing to say, before Miller’s acolytes crushed two decades under their bootheels.
That’s pureBlonde Venusburlesque.
And the ultimate salvage job onBatman & Robinwon’t even require camp reclamation.
In 1997, the gigantic sets and collectible henchmen were toy-commercial embarrassments of merchandising madness.
Now you treasure the glorious (lost?)
art of physical set design and non-mocap costumes.
Digital effects age bad quick, and some wonderful recent superhero movies already look precarious.
But there is a lot of CGI, which looks awful and epitomizes the ambient laziness.
Silverstone comes “all the way from England” with zero attempted accent.
Schumacher’s only stylistic idea is to go diagonal.
The whole notion of Batman and Robin warring over Poison Ivy keeps fizzling out.
Clooney doesn’t commit to the whole sudden-onset passion, which is lame.
(O’Donnell commits too much, which is somehow worse.)
The action scenes are fine second unit work, stunts performed well in front of boring camera angles.
I’m on the record as lovingthe Batman movie with the trained exploding shark.
So what makesthatridiculous so much better thanthisridiculous?
The dialogue is all groaners.
On Poison Ivy:
BATMAN:“Great stems, though.”
ROBIN:“Buds, too.”
BATMAN:“Yeah, those are nice.”
Ho ho,boobs!
Batgirl first appears and immediately assaults Ivy with a rare incident of woman-to-woman mansplaining.
“Using feminine wiles to get what you want?”
“Trading on your looks?
Read a book, sister, that passive-aggressive number went out long ago.
Chicks like you give women a bad name.”
Where to begin?Read a book, sister.
That passive-aggressive number.Chicks, chick, chicks everywhere.
“Chicks dig the car!”
“Hey, not bad for a chick!”
Spike the motorbike maniac yells at Barbara.
Then there’s Mr.
The main problem isn’t that lines like “Allow me to break the ice!”
are dumb though they are, always, forever.
The problem is that Schwarzenegger keeps breaking the one rule that ever worked for him.
I’m sorry, but: Play it cool.
But by 1997 he thought he was hilarious, and his nonstop mugging is joyless and constant.
Schwarzenegger gets top billing, above Batman.
How many rewrites stroked the 25-million-dollar ego?
Freeze hangs out in his den smoking a cigar, a habit literally any Schwarzenegger profile mentions.
Fox has one scene as an underling throwing herself at the boss.
So the ladies flirt with Freeze while he keeps his wife on ice.
Some alleged autobiography there, but you notice how far we’ve fallen from the Tim Burton movies.
Selina Kyle had nine dimensions, and she blew her boss up with a stun gun kiss.
The female villain gets knocked out before the final act.
(They’re so dangerous that they don’tneedto be physically threatening.)
Freeze turns good because Batman believes in rehabilitation when it’s a guy, I guess.
In Arkham Asylum, he gets special clearance to take vengeance on Ivy.
Her journey ends where it began: She’s a woman getting tormented by some crazy scientist guy.
If this sounds good you probably also lovedHobbs & Shaw, but ironic enjoyment only goes so far.
The big emotional thread ofBatman & Robinsuggests that Bruce needs to learn the value of family.
Alfred (Michael Gough) is sick, and even Batman cannot cure mortality, except he can.
Gough was a dependable presence in all his Alfred appearances.
He manages to pull a couple sly moving moments out of the script’s flaming wreckage.
As Commissioner Gordon, Pat Hingle barely changes his expression from 1989 through 1997.
That’s just unfussy character acting, but consider how much everything else transforms around him.
His gray city is dying.
The street outside is dirty and dour.
Eight years later, Gordon’s carrying the local billionaire’s precious diamonds at a black-tie Debutante Auction.
Gotham’s mean streets are safe enough for a Taco Bell franchise.
His city looks safer, but soulless: Times Square after Disney, local flavor banished for maximum profits.
Gary Oldman never looked so pathetic, but restrained cool doesn’t necessarily equal honesty.
The reboots to come fearedBatman & Robin’s legacy, and made changes that were obviously healthy.
Taco Bell persists, no matter what Christopher Nolan thinks cities should look like.
