Batman and Robin (1997) is this week’s Netflix pick of the week. George Clooney gives a performance of a century, simply an emotionally stunning performance as our favorite Dark Knight. In this Joel Schumacher film that is a dark and tragic masterpiece about crime, true trust, friendship, family, and the everlasting longevity of good over evil.
Just kidding this film is simply awful. If you want a movie that will make you cry. This will not be it. If you want a film that will have you question the very fabric of your life. This is most certainly not that film.
But if you want a simple entertaining mess. This is the film for you.
Even with my attacks against this movie it is actually very entertaining, albeit for the same reason a train wreck is entertaining. Watch and simply be amazed at how many ice puns they could fit into the script!
It’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman knew how bad it was and turned the overacting notch that lies within them to twenty. The whole movie is a bizarre, garish spectacle filled with neon lights and glow-paint.
If I haven’t made it clear about my thoughts on the movie just know, it’s terrible. I enjoy this stinking pile of movie because of what it represents.
But Batman more than any other character is an amalgam of the mood, outlook and personality of America.
When he was created in 1939, he was a grim, dark figure, fighting crime with gadgets, grit, and guns.
In the 1960s, he became a campy character who was inconvenienced by the villains, rather than killed by them (this was of course because you couldn’t show someone being murdered on TV).
When the movies started coming out in the late 80s/early 90s, he was once again a grim guardian of the night, going toe-to-toe with maniacs and lunatics. In the animated TV series, he was an omniscient god – he knew things before the villains did them.
This film is the mid 1990s condensed, melted, and poured into 125 minutes of neon, bad taste and actors who really shouldn’t have had their names associated with it. To experience this movie is to be in 1997 America, when the Internet was still that thing you heard about on Friends and everyone was getting rich off of, you could still board an airplane without being bombarded by X-Rays, and everyone hoped for the future.
So sit back, relax and grab your Mellow Yellow, because it’s time for a trip back in time.
