Young people who have grown up with Batman Begins and Dark Knight are truly privileged, because the kids and adults that had to go through Batman & Robin when it was first released were seriously scarred. Batman (George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) must take on new villains Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman). Freeze wants to freeze Gotham City and he teams up with Poison Ivy, so Batman and Robin must get past their differences in order to take down these evil villains.
This Batman film continues from the Val Kilmer Batman film, which was also flawed but overall a solid Batman flick that had a lot of good in it. I will admit straight off the bat, that I can find a lot of enjoyment watching Batman & Robin because of its campy awfulness. It seems to do everything in its arsenal to remove any dramatic or believable tension from the plot it has. We've all seen that Batman can be made into a realistic and oscar worthy masterpiece by Christopher Nolan, so looking back at this Joel Schumacher directed mess is just painful. The look of the film goes past any sort of comic book styling into some kind of disco themed nightmare. The acting is as hammed up and laughable, all to be blamed on its truly bonehead script. We have one scene where I kid you not, Clooney references a Bat credit card.
Clooney is a very good actor for sure, as seen in Michael Clayton and Up in the Air but here he looks bored and confused. Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer were given decent scripts and pulled of the dual role of Wayne/Batman nicely, but here you have to feel for Clooney being stuck with this turd of film. Schwarzenegger always has a charisma and an energy to every role he embodies but here he's painful to watch, which is a shame to say the least. The entire cast is buried under bad dialogue and over used CGI (impressive I'll admit). We have a plot that is C grade bond materia and seems like it was written in about 5 minutes. All this suggests that the people involved thought if they brought in a swarm of A list actors and slapped the Batman logo on the poster that the film would make itself. It appears that didn't quite go to plan.
It took eight years for another Batman film to be made after this one (Batman Begins, 2005) and im pretty sure it wasn't for a lack of ideas or interest, but mostly because people only thought of this film when you mentioned the dark knight's name. This was a misfire on every level and a film that is so bad and so poorly thought out that it's actually quite fun to watch.
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