Friday, July 20, 2012
Film Your Bat-Weekend at the Bat-Movies
Posted by Jesse Hassenger on Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 8:59 AM
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Batman & Robin (1997): Just as I might have enjoyed the campy 60s take on Batman were it not about Batman, I might have enjoyed this large-scale ridiculousness had it taken an expensively retrograde spin on another superhero franchise. Maybe. I actually just rewatched it the other night as a horrible coda to my rewatching of the first two Nolan Bat-pictures, and as a reminder of what another cinematic interpretation of semi-popular villain Bane looked like. What it looks like is: horrible (assuming Nolan's Bane improves on the interesting-if-90s-ish comics version, this Bane can sit at the other end of the spectrum: an inflated pro wrestler with sickly greenish skin doing poor man's Frankenstein's Monster shtick). Even as a big-budget take on the 60s TV series, even allowing that the idea of doing a big-budget version of a low-budget-looking live-action cartoon is kind of a stupid idea, Batman & Robin is pretty deficient; Joel Schumacher lacks the pop-art panache to pull off a scene where Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) enters in homage to the Marlene Dietrich movie Blonde Venus to the strains of an instrumental version of the old Coasters song "Poison Ivy"—that sounds sort of cracked in a neat Baz Luhrmann way, but the scene feels traffic-directed rather than smoothly cut together. Bungled moments like this, as well as some even clumsier attempts at familial earnestness, make Batman & Robin endlessly fascinating: you can see money being shoveled into the franchise furnace on screen, yet everything is intricately hideous and plastic-looking. It is probably the worst movie I own on DVD and have seen several times. Grade: C-
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