Batman & Robin (1997)

"This is why Superman works alone!”

Oh dear. What an absolutely terrible film. Incoherent, full of meaningless bangs and explosions, and with ridiculous overacting from Schwarzenegger and Thurman in particular, and a bafflingly miscast George Clooney who plays Batman as a generic superhero of the sort you simply can’t imagine beating up criminals for information like he used to when he was Michael Keaton.

Indeed, Clooney seems to be channelling Adam West as a goody-goody Batman but with absolutely none of the camp humour that was the whole point. And, after largely ditching Tim Burton’s moody darkness reflective of the ‘80s comics, this film drops it entirely. We may have the same Alfred and the same Jim Gordon, but this is otherwise unrecognisable from those distant-seeming Tim Burton days.

The whole thing is just cartoonish and silly. Arnie hams it up as Mr Freeze (always a rubbish villain) from the start, and those constant terrible puns completely erase any possible pathos that could potentially be supplied by his motivation to cure his wife. But even worse is the appallingly silly performance from Thurman, an otherwise talented actress, who completely sends up the character of Poison Ivy, although of course the script does that anyway. Bane is wasted as a generic henchman and Jason Woodrow just gets to be a generic mad scientist to twirl his moustache for a bit and get killed. The whole movie is a tick box exercise of featuring various characters for the sake of it and just wasting them.

Perhaps the worst case of this is Barbara Gordon, although for some reason here she’s Alfred’s niece instead of Jim’s daughter- she unexpectedly turns up from England without telling anyone, for some reason wearing her school uniform, and claims to be English although Alicia Silverstone isn’t bothering with the accent. And then plot convenience let’s her discover the Batcave and a costume that Alfred made for her on the off-chance(!), and she duffs up Poison Ivy in spite of having no apparent combat experience or athletic prowess. This is all just very silly.

And I haven’t even mentioned THOSE nipples, and the scenes with Batman and Robin bidding in the millions for Poison Ivy. Can we just end the franchise now? Oh.