BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

After re-screening BATMAN AND ROBIN, my first thought was, "why did audiences reject this film from director Schumacher and writer Goldsman, but not BATMAN FOREVER, the previous film by (roughly) the same director-writer team?" "BATMAN FOUR," as I choose to call it, features the same combination of overbaked action sequences and ham-handed humor as FOREVER. So why did FOREVER make money, while FOUR did so badly that it killed the Bat-film franchise for roughly the next eight years?

It would be useless to look at what professional critics said about FOUR in 1997; critics frequently revile Hollywood's big action movies, and more often than not the mass audiences ignore the scorn and queue up for Hollywood action anyway. FOUR is, if anything, a little better plotted than FOREVER. While there's no emotional core in the Val Kilmer Bat-film, FOUR at least hinges on the news that steadfast butler Alfred (Michael Gough) may perish from an illness soon, giving both Batman (George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) some opportunity for grave reflections-- that is, when they can get their minds off the bewitching Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman). 

Ivy, in her turn as a "noob villain," has a slightly credible reason to work with established super-crook Mister Freeze-- at least more so that Two-Face working with noob villain Riddler in FOREVER. I'm not saying that I liked the script's idea that the vegetable villainess fell in love with the frigid fiend. But at least it's some kind of motive for her to follow Freeze around and try to get him to obliterate humanity with a New Ice Age. When the heroes finally get over squabbling over the hot villainess-- and it's not always certain as to how much they're responding to Ivy's chemical charms-- they finally manage to defeat both Ivy and Freeze. Yet Freeze's technology helps the crusaders come up with a way to preserve Alfred's life, which is a neater plot-twist than anything in FOREVER.

The other debut in FOUR is a new version of Batgirl, who is no longer the daughter of Commissioner Gordon, but the niece of Alfred, who's come to Wayne Manor because she knows of her uncle's fatal disease. I don't begrudge Goldsman's alteration of the canonical character. In none of the Burton or Schumacher Bat-films does the Commissioner (Pat Hingle) get anything interesting to do, so there was no particular reason to build up his character when Alfred was much more consequential to the plot. There's even an early seventies Bat-comic which introduces a niece for the sturdy butler. That said, Goldsman utterly fumbles any motivation as to why Niece Barbara has decided to train herself to become Batgirl, though something is said about her doing it as a commemoration of her dying relative. (Guess that assumes that Alfred blabbed his employers' secret to everyone in the family, since he's totally on board with her taking up arms as a superheroine, yet never broaches the subject in advance to Bruce or Dick.) As essayed by Alicia  Silverstone, Batgirl/Barbara at least shows more moxie than I found in O'Donnell's Robin or in Clooney's smarmy Batman, and she's seen to good effect in a catfight with Poison Ivy. All that said, Batgirl's subplot stretches out an already overburdened story even further.

So what's the thing in FOUR that I think had ordinary viewers giving the movie bad word of mouth, and thus leading to its disappointing box office? I think it was Schwarzenegger's Mister Freeze who most put the hex on the flick. I've liked Ah-nold in a lot of his crowd-pleasing films, but I think even the most devout fan in 1997 would have been cringing throughout the opening, in which the heroes keep dodging Freeze's ice-beams while the villain tosses out putrid puns like "Ice to see you!" Yes, the mass audience usually liked Ah-nold whipping out one-liners, but Goldsman's puns are REALLY bad. 

On a related note, I don't imagine the average filmgoer was aware of how the 1992 BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES had re-imagined the cold-themed villain as a man obsessed with his cryogenically-preserved wife. Yet, even though Goldsman had no intention of playing up the drama of Freeze's bereavement, Goldsman still worked the story of the frozen wife into his mess of a script. This ended up making the cold crook seem like a scatterbrain, mourning his poor wife one minute and cracking ice-jokes the next. The mass audience will put up with a lot of silliness to enjoy Hollywood's big budget thrills. But they usually don't like to get the sense that Hollywood filmmakers think that they the filmgoers are stupid enough to buy anything. To be sure, any other actor rattling off Goldsman's nonsense wouldn't have fared any better. But it's my theory that once a favored star like Schwarzenegger was involved in this farrago, that made his presence even less tolerable than Clooney's supercilious starring role. And so the Bat-franchise sank beneath the waves for a time, and FOUR's failure at least guaranteed that Schumacher would get no more shots at superhero properties-- even though Goldsman, over time, seemed to get better, if one can judge from his billing as one of the STARGIRL writers.