Batman & Robin (1997) Review
3/10
A scientist frozen in an accident becomes a man in a refrigeration suit who cannot stop making puns about ice. A botanist becomes a woman with poisonous lips. They intend to freeze Gotham and repopulate it with plants.
The 3 is for the design work, which is genuinely committed, and for Arnold Schwarzenegger, who understood the assignment better than anybody. Everything structural is broken, and it was broken by a mandate instead of by incompetence.
This is the clearest case study on its page. Every decision people mock was a note somebody gave, and the director followed the notes, and the notes were about merchandise.
The Mandate Was Toys
Warner Bros. fast-tracked the film after Batman Forever made money, and Schumacher has said the instruction was to make it more toyetic than the previous one.
Every criticism follows from that word. Four vehicles that could be sold as vehicles. Multiple costume variants for each hero, including the ones that exist for no plot reason. Two villains and a sidekick, because a line of figures needs a line of characters.
The suits are the most discussed example and the least interesting. The armor was sculpted for a toy silhouette, and the anatomical detail people mock is what happens when a costume is designed to read at four inches tall.
The plot construction gives it away more clearly. Freeze and Ivy have separate schemes that do not need each other, they meet late, and their alliance is asserted instead of dramatized. That is what two villains looks like when the requirement is two action figures and not two opposing wants.
Once you know the brief, the film stops being baffling. It is a competent execution of a bad instruction, and the interesting question is not why it is like this but why nobody in the chain refused.
The schedule tells the same story. Principal photography began in September 1996 and wrapped in January 1997, two weeks early, for a June release. Nothing about this was troubled. A studio ordered a specific product, a large and professional crew delivered exactly that product ahead of time and under control, and the product itself was the problem.
A commercial mandate that arrives before the story is written will shape every scene, because the requirements become fixed points the plot has to route between.
Notice the direction of travel. The toys did not follow the film. The film was assembled to justify a toy line that had already been decided on, which is the same failure as writing a novel around a series contract.
When you receive that kind of brief, the useful move is to make the requirements do story work. Two villains can be a real structure. Here they are two separate plots that barely touch.
Schwarzenegger Is Doing the Right Film
Freeze is written as a pun machine and Schwarzenegger plays him at exactly that pitch, with no attempt to find pathos in a man who says the word ice forty times.
That is the correct choice given the material and he is the only cast member who commits to it. Clooney plays Batman as mildly embarrassed, Thurman plays camp with visible effort, and O’Donnell plays sincere in a film that has no sincerity around him.
The one place the film reaches for real feeling is Freeze’s wife, frozen and dying, and the sentiment is genuinely present in about two scenes. That thread is the good film buried underneath, and it belongs to a version with one villain and half the running time.
Michael Gough’s Alfred gets the other decent material. His illness supplies the film’s only stakes that anybody cares about, and Gough plays it straight through the neon, which is a kind of professionalism worth naming.
Uma Thurman is the interesting failure. Poison Ivy is written as pure vamp and Thurman plays it as a 1930s screen siren, which is a defensible reading and lands in a film with no other register to sit against. In a picture with one tone she would be excellent. Here she is a fourth thing in a room that already had three.
The Design Is Committed
Gotham here is a permanent night of statuary, colored gel and enormous architectural nudes, and it is the most theatrical version of the city anybody has filmed.
Whatever else the film gets wrong, nobody phoned in the look. Stephen Goldblatt lights everything in saturated blues and greens, the sets are vast and physically built, and Elliot Goldenthal’s score is doing full orchestral work for a film that does not deserve it.
That commitment is why the film has a genuine audience now. Watched as pure design, without any expectation of a story, it is the only Batman film with an identity that is entirely its own.
The comparison is Flash Gordon, which is on the same shelf and works, and the difference is instructive. Flash Gordon has a story that its camp serves. This has camp with nothing underneath it.
Style with no structure underneath produces a work people quote and nobody rewatches. The design carries a first viewing and there is nothing for the second.
The rule of thumb: heightened register needs a spine of real stakes to be heightened against. Take away the stakes and the register has nothing to measure itself by.
That is why the Alfred thread stands out. It is the only element in the film operating at normal emotional scale, and everything around it briefly means more when it is on screen.
Schumacher Apologized
He said publicly and repeatedly that the film did not work, that he was responsible, and that he was sorry to the fans who wanted something else. He did it on a commentary track, in interviews and for the rest of his life.
That is worth stating plainly because it is rare. Directors defend their failures, cite interference, or decline to discuss them. Schumacher took the blame for a picture assembled under a mandate he did not write.
He also cast well and directed actors kindly by every account from the people in it, and the two Batman films he made are the only ones in that run that anybody describes as fun. Batman Forever worked well enough that the studio doubled the instruction, which is the mechanism that produced this. Success in a direction is what gets you told to go further in it, and nobody in the history of the business has ever once been instructed to push a little bit further along whichever direction had only just failed on them.
He also kept working and made Tigerland, Phone Booth and Falling Down before it, which is a body of work that deserves better than a single punchline. The apology is part of why he gets one anyway.
The story is worth holding onto for the shape of the responsibility. The instruction came from above him, he executed it, and the version where he blames Warner Bros. is available and true and he never used it.
What It Cost the Franchise
A hundred and twenty-five to a hundred and sixty million dollars in production against about two hundred and thirty-eight worldwide, which is not a disaster on its face and was a substantial drop from its predecessor.
The real result was that the series stopped. A planned follow-up was abandoned, and there was no theatrical Batman for eight years until Christopher Nolan restarted it from nothing in 2005.
That gap is the film’s actual legacy. Batman Begins is a direct reaction, and its seriousness, its muted color and its insistence on physical plausibility are all arguments against this picture specifically.
So it did something after all, which is the strange consolation available here. A franchise that had drifted toward merchandise got stopped hard enough that the next attempt had to justify itself from first principles.
Tim Burton is the other absence that matters. This is the only film in that original run made with no involvement from him in any capacity, and whatever one thinks of his two Batman pictures, they had a governing sensibility. Remove the person with the vision and what remains is the brief.
A failure that stops a direction is more useful than a mediocrity that lets it continue. This film ended a mode of blockbuster filmmaking by being unmistakable about where it led.
For your own work, the equivalent is a project that fails clearly. It tells you something a project that half worked never will, and the information is worth the cost if you really read it.
The condition is that somebody has to draw the right conclusion. Warner Bros. drew it here, waited eight years, and hired a director with an opposite instinct.
Should you watch Batman & Robin?
Only as a case study, or as design. There is a genuinely committed visual imagination in this film and a mandate about toys sitting on top of it, and the most interesting thing about it now is that the man who made it spent twenty years saying so.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists