This is a colourful superfreak who really wouldn’t stand out amongst Batman’s gallery of villains, alongside other Silver Age baddies like Crazy Quilt or the Ratcatcher. This is the iteration of the character who appeared on Adam West’s Batman! played with suitably ham-tastic gusto by actors like Eli Wallach and Otto Preminger. The first comes, of course, from the Silver Age, back when the character was “Mr. The movie essentially tries to mesh two differing portrayals of the character.īruce must have gone bats, trusting Robin like that. The fact that Schumacher’s shortlist for the character reportedly included names like Patrick Stewart and Anthony Hopkins alongside Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger says a lot about the difficulty with the character. Let’s talk for a moment about Victor Fries, the second-rate Batman villain known as Mister Freeze. There’s also the fact that the movie has a great deal of difficulty balancing tone consistently. I’d like to thank Joel Schumacher for ensuring I never look at Michael Gough the same way again. There’s something just inherently wrong about an uncle designing an outfit like that, when we’re treated to gratuitous ass and boob shots. “Suit me up, Uncle Alfred,” Alicia Silverstone commands in her most innocent voice. In the gutters, looking at the bat signal.Īnyway the scene would be a little bit much on its own, but then the audience suddenly remembered that Batgirl’s Uncle designed this for her. It shouts, “Hey kids! Objectification works both ways!” which isn’t as bad a motto as “Objectify girls!” but perhaps not quite as strong as “Objectification is bad!” It isn’t a good scene by any stretch of the imagination, but I suppose it makes the later sequence where Schumacher does the exact same thing to Batgirl seem less wrong in some way. So the movie opens with a suiting up montage featuring both Batman and Robin. Apparently the audience loved the nipples and the ass shots so much in the last film that Schumacher just had to bring them back. Take, for instance, the gratuitous “suiting up” scenes. I mean the movie just struggles to do anything right. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not typing this from the perspective of a comic book nerd or anything like that – I don’t care if they change a character’s origin or a certain event or whatever. I can forgive a film that, and it might even venture into the oft-lauded realm of “so bad it’s almost good.” It’s the simple fact that so much of the film isn’t just bad… it’s completely and utterly wrong. It isn’t the fact that it’s a terribly-made film, with poor choices in acting and direction. If anybody is qualified to tell Victor Fries that revenge is a stupid idea and that he should learn to channel his pain into more constructive efforts, it isn’t Batman.īeing honest, I think that’s the biggest problem I have with Batman & Robin. This movie’s particular nugget of life advice, as served up by Batman to the villain he has just vanquished, comes in the heartwarming moral, “Vengeance isn’t power.” It’s a nice sentiment, but it might sound more authoritative coming from a guy who doesn’t dress up like a bat while breaking the bones in the bodies of various henchmen because mummy and daddy were shot in a dark alleyway decades ago. This misreading of Batman continues into Schumacher’s follow-up the somehow even weaker Batman & Robin. Now… because I choose to be.” That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of Batman that anybody with any familiarity with the character could spot as a misreading – you might as well have a version of Superman stalking the girl he knocked up. “You see, I’m both Bruce Wayne and Batman,” the character explained in the movie’s mandatory moment of revelation. It’s just poorly made and clearly the product of a production crew that knew absolutely nothing about Batman as a character. It's some kinda storm (it's not "snow", but it begins with "s").
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