“I will blanket the city in endless winter.”
Batman & Robin is not a good movie. It’s not even close. Director Joel Schumacher had already fumbled the franchise once when he took over the reigns from Tim Burton for Batman Forever, but that film could be considered borderline masterful next to this one. It’s even worse than the silly campiness that the Superman series devolved into a decade prior. Schumacher thrusts a hodgepodge of villains into the mix, blasts the corneas with bold colors, shoots everything with a canted frame, and then goes nuts with special and visual effects and calls it a day. The story is juvenile and patchy, the characters have no depth, and the actors have to choose to either go overboard or not take themselves seriously at all. A complete mess from beginning to end.
Chris O’Donnell returns as Robin, and George Clooney replaces Val Kilmer in the nippled Batsuit. Alicia Silverstone adds to our hero count when she finds the Batcave and becomes Batgirl. Like the rest of the series, Batman’s name may be in the title, but he is not the main character. Instead, the focus is on the villains. In Batman, Jack Nicholson owned the film as The Joker. In Batman Returns, The Penguin and Catwoman shared the duties as antagonists. In Batman Forever, Two-Face teamed up with The Riddler. For Batman & Robin, there are no less than four villains: Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), Bane (Robert Swenson), and Floronic Man (John Glover), though Glover does not get much screen time.
The story pulls the framework of its story from the “Heart of Ice” episode in Batman: The Animated Series, but is about one percent as emotionally resonant as the twenty minute cartoon, which says something about the quality of each of them. It involves a research professor who suffers an accident in a cryogenic lab, requiring the use of a cryogenic suit powered by diamonds, and a botanist left to die beneath a pile of toxic materials who survives and enacts revenge. It is a caricature at best, and features annoying little oddities like Batman having his own bank, Mr. Freeze smoking cigars, and Robin playing ice hockey with a fist-sized diamond. It’s really just there so that something happens in between the mindless action scenes.
About the only highlight is Uma Thurman, who goes for broke as the seductive ecoterrorist who functions as a femme fatale for both Batman and Robin. She speaks with an exaggerated accent and her get-up is the most iconic in a film full of bad costuming choices. In contrast to the other cast members, specifically Clooney (who looks bored and so plays Bruce Wayne as boring) and Chris O’Donnell (who seems like he is taking himself too seriously for Schumacher’s campy style), Thurman is committed to the trash vibe. She looks like she’s actually having fun with the childish material and it makes her scenes one of the few elements that don’t induce nausea.
Schwarzenegger is almost unbearable as Mr. Freeze. He speaks entirely in one-liners (“Let’s kick some ice!” “Tonight, hell freezes over!”) and is coated in a gritty blue paint the entire time. It’s like Schumacher tried to mash the camp aesthetic of the Adam West Batman into a film with a lot of money behind it, and the expectations of the studio and the director just didn’t match. And Schwarzenegger’s casting makes no sense whatsoever. Mr. Freeze is a calculating, articulate, emotionless sociopath, not a muscled maniac who speaks in one-liners. It would have made much more sense for the Governator to be cast as Bane, which would have played right into his limited strengths as an actor.
The film features so many outrageous costumed characters that I cynically suspect that Warner Bros. intended Batman & Robin as a cash in to sell more toys. It is not a coincidence that Poison Ivy even suggests in the film that each Poison Ivy action figure comes with one of Bane as well. And maybe that is its true legacy, as bad as it is: that a superhero film can and should be more than just a toy commercial. The film pulled in a decent haul at the box office, but was rightfully panned critically. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins ran so far in the opposite direction that it took until Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) for a superhero film to truly embrace camp sensibilities again; and DC mostly still goes for that realistic, gritty aesthetic that succeeded in Nolan’s films.
It’s probably not even worth viewing as an artifact of its time. If you wanted to watch Batman from the 1990s, nothing is better than Batman: The Animated Series. Mask of the Phantasm is a great feature length animated film in continuity with the series, as is Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero, which uses the same villain as Batman & Robin. I implore you not to put yourself through this travesty of a film unless you are super interested in Uma Thurman hamming it up or a Batman completionist.