Batman & Robin (1997) Review
3/10
A scientist frozen in an accident becomes a man in a refrigeration suit who can’t 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 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.
I find this movie exhausting, and a lot of that comes from knowing it didn’t have to be this bad. Every decision people mock was a note somebody gave, the director followed the notes, and the notes were about merchandise. Watching it feels like being sold a lunchbox with a plot stapled to the lid.
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, and it’s the sloppiest part. Freeze and Ivy have separate schemes that don’t need each other, they meet late, and their alliance is asserted instead of dramatized. Two villains built this way have no opposing wants to play. They’re two action figures the requirement said had to be in the box.
Once you know the brief, the film stops being baffling. It’s a competent execution of a bad instruction, and the interesting question isn’t why it’s 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 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 didn’t follow the film. The film was assembled to justify a toy line that had already been decided on. That’s 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’re 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’s the correct choice given the material, and I enjoy him more than anyone else on screen because he’s 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 with no sincerity anywhere near him.
The one place the film reaches for real feeling is Freeze’s wife, frozen and dying, and the sentiment is 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. That’s 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. That’s a defensible reading and lands in a film with no other tone to sit against. In a picture with one tone she’d be excellent. Here she’s a fourth thing in a room that already had three.
The Design Is Committed
Gotham here’s a permanent night of statuary, colored gel and enormous architectural nudes, and it’s 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 doesn’t deserve it. That commitment is why the film has a real audience now. Watched as pure design, without any expectation of a story, it’s the only Batman film with an identity that’s entirely its own.
The film I keep measuring it against is Flash Gordon, which sits on the same shelf and works. Flash Gordon has a story its camp serves. This has camp with nothing underneath it, and I find that emptier than any amount of bad acting.
Style with no structure underneath produces a work people quote and nobody rewatches. The design carries a first viewing and there’s nothing for the second.
The rule of thumb: heightened tone needs a spine of real stakes to be heightened against. Take away the stakes and the tone has nothing to measure itself by. That’s why the Alfred thread stands out. It’s the only element in the film operating at normal emotional scale, and everything around it briefly means more when it’s on screen.
Schumacher Apologized
He said publicly and repeatedly that the film didn’t 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.
I respect that more than anything in the film itself, because it’s rare. Directors defend their failures, cite interference or decline to discuss them. Schumacher took the blame for a picture assembled under a mandate he didn’t 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. That’s 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. That’s 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. That isn’t a disaster on its face and was a serious 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 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.
So it did something after all, and I’m grateful for that part. 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.
It’s a 3 because the look is committed and Schwarzenegger knows exactly what movie he’s in, and everything else is a toy catalog wearing a cape. The sorriest part is that the Alfred scenes and Freeze’s dying wife prove somebody on this set could have made a real Batman film, and the brief never let them. The man who made it spent twenty years saying so, and I think that’s the most interesting thing about it now.
