Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves

 

Robin Hood: Prince In Tights Of Thieves

Dir. Kevin Reynolds

Written by Pen Densham, John Watson

Starring Kevin Coster, Morgan Freeman, Mary Elizabeth Mastantonio, Alan Rickman

 

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THEIVES (or, RH:PoT, as the hip online kids of today call it) begins in a Jerusalem torture chamber. The first faces we see close-up are the filthy, sadistic (but helpfully English-speaking!) visages of the dungeon's torture/amputation division, as they ply their trade on the miserable Christian captives of the failed Third Crusades. In fact, even after we get a look at the hapless Englishmen, we may not realize that one of the men we are looking at is our protagonist, because he's dressed in soiled rags and sports a beard and mane that would make ZZ Top jealous. These are most assuredly not merry men. Short of starting with the slug line "The Dawn of Man," there isn't much more a film could do to convey to us in no uncertain terms that this aint yo' pappy's ROBIN HOOD. Unless you were born after 1991, in which case, it actually IS your pappy's ROBIN HOOD, canonized with a Mel Brooks parody, no less. 

In fact, I got the idea to watch this one when I reviewed ROBIN HOOD, MEN IN TIGHTS and dismissively suggested it might be funnier if you were familiar with PRINCE OF THIEVES, which I described as "a movie that no one on Earth has watched in nearly a half a century." Well, as you can imagine, it didn't even take a full minute after typing that sentence before I was overwhelmed with desire to remedy that situation. Which was an unexpected sensation for me, given that I had never previously regretted passing on this movie when it first came out and everyone agreed it was a drag. Indeed, the movie was roundly criticized at the time for being too dark and serious. Ebert called it "murky, unfocused, violent and depressing," and went on to describe it as "gloomy" and Costner as "tortured." Vincent Canby called it "joyless" and slammed it for, um, "coming out firmly for civil rights, feminism, religious freedom, and economic opportunity for all" (apparently SJWs have been ruining all culture with their divisive politics since 1991 at least).

It was, in fact, arguably the origin --patient zero-- of the trend towards dark and gritty reboots which would become basically a full-blown cultural movement by the turn of the millennium. There were earlier cinematic* stirrings of this trend; John Boorman’s trippy, violent EXCALIBUR (1981) might be an example, and Tim Burton’s BATMAN from two years earlier comes even closer (especially in terms of how it was perceived at the time), but RH:PoT is much more beholden to some kind of faux-realistic affectation than either of those movies even pretended to be. People considered those films (and the following year’s BATMAN RETURNS), to be dark, but they’re certainly not “gritty,” which turns out to be a vital –although perhaps not quite as foundational as it might appear-- element of what would become the formula. “Gritty and realistic” remakes were not, of course, wholly unknown in 1991; Outlawvern commenter Pacman 2.0 noted the 1984 ‘this ain’t your daddy’s Tarzan’ adventure/drama GREYSTOKE, which definitely feels like it shares at least some DNA with PRINCE OF THEIVES in its self-conscious foregrounding of “gritty realism” within a pulpy premise. But it differs in that it represents an effort to return to the original (somewhat darker and more intellectual**) source material. PRINCE OF THEIVES has no definitive source material (the conception of “Robin Hood” and the related characters evolved slowly over centuries of poems, ballads and plays, all of which clearly arise from older folk traditions which predate the 15^th-century records which survive today), and so can’t claim fidelity to authoritative origins. Or to any kind of established history, for that matter, which perhaps explains why it feints towards “realism” only in a few highly selective ways, more as a signifier that it ought to be taken seriously than as an honest attempt to grapple with this subject in any kind of real world context (there’s a magical witch and a Bryan Adams song, among other distinctly fantastical elements).

The “realism,” then, is mostly a facade, though it would prove to be of defining aesthetic significance in the films that later adopted the same technique. Fundamentally, though, PRINCE OF THEIVES, like EXCALIBUR, Burton’s BATMAN films or the later Nolan/Snyder superhero films, is banking not on authenticity, but on surprise: its ability to shock a complacent audience by intentionally undermining expectations about a universally known icon which has grown so familiar as to feel “safe.” It is, like many of the “dark and gritty” reboots that would follow it, a movie that is deliberately confrontational towards an audiences’ presumed expectations about the subject matter. The entire raison d’etre is to say “hey kids, this isn’t the old, boring Robin Hood your parents like! This is the real Robin Hood, brash, uncompromised, uncowed, the one your square history teachers don’t want you to know about! He shares your dangerous, rebellious disaffection, scares your parents, and just might be too hot for polite society to handle!” (it’s worth noting that the production company, Morgan Creek, had previously enjoyed some in-retrospect-utterly-inexplicable success with its similarly irreverent semi-revisionist Western YOUNG GUNS).

It is this pugnacious attitude, based on shaking the comforting perceptions of nostalgic figures (many associated with childhood) that I think critics were responding to back then; it’s not that these films are necessarily “dark” compared to, say, other 1991 alumni like PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS or SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (or even TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY, which is indisputably more violent and intense). It’s that the film’s entire modus operandi has to do with subverting our expectations about deep-rooted cultural icons which have persevered so long as to feel centering and stable and perhaps somehow “pure,” untouched by the messy world of adulthood –but also static, abstract and unthreatening. Challenging that can be uncomfortable in some ways, which is, I think, what makes it potentially productive in others: I don’t know how culturally valuable it is to perpetually reimagine the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so they stay fresh and vibrant for future generations, but one can at least dimly imagine some value in taking the tale of Robin Hood –with its fundamental fury at wealth inequality and wholehearted endorsement of revolutionary resistance—and shaking off the cobwebs a little, rescuing the tale from being a harmless fairy story rendered toothless by rote repetition and restoring its subversive bite. And locating it within a cinematic “reality” featuring distinctive signifiers that point to contemporary relevance –such as the “dark and gritty” aesthetic which, at least in 1991, was a cue to interpret the material as serious and hard-hitting, as opposed to the idealized, theatrical affectations most of the kids in 1991 would have associated with the corny old Robin Hood movies of the past—feels like a legitimate strategy to that end. But it is, ultimately, a strategy, not an end in itself. So while the critics –including myself!—often find it convenient to describe this and similar films as “dark and gritty,” they are really doing something rather different just underneath the surface. It’s just that to do so, something like ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THEIVES combines both the calculated “darkening” of material popularly perceived as frothy matinee stuff for kiddies (like we see in EXCALIBUR and the BATMANs) with the “realistic” “grittiness” of GREYSTOKE (or the next year’s revisionist UNFORGIVEN) to add some visceral weight and punch to a basic premise which had perhaps been dulled and diluted through rote repetition.

This would, of course, prove hugely influential as a technique, in many ways becoming a defining feature of the way studios thought about revitalizing old properties in the subsequent years (though the effect was not immediate – by 1995’s BATMAN FOREVER, the studio was deliberately trying to lighten things up, and it wasn’t until the ignominious failure of the glibly comic BATMAN & ROBIN in 1997 that the tide really started to turn. And even then, you had the cartoonish GODZILLA remake in 1998 and the old-fashioned corniness of THE MUMMY reboot in 1999). It obviously it struck some kind of chord at the time, though; the movie was a huge hit. But in1991, it sounded like a bunch of pretentious self-serious garbage to me, and I never bothered with it.

Imagine my surprise, then, to finally watch the movie and discover thirty years later that it is in fact a completely different kind of garbage! All that fretting about the gloomy, intellectual new Robin Hood was bunk, probably a response to the studio PR machine more than the movie itself. Far from being a broody, intellectual bore, RH:PoT turns out, in fact, to be a movie which is almost maniacal in its desire to entertain. You can almost hear the producers screaming "There should be witty banter in EVERY scene! And constant swashbuckling action! And raw sex appeal! And sweeping, expensive spectacle! But also relatable aw-shucks human drama! And for God's sake, can we get some sweeping, triumphant music in here?" Apparently this is what "dark and gritty" was like in 1991. It was a time of innocence.

But just because it’s not actually dark and gritty at all doesn’t mean it’s not a labored mess, it’s just a labored mess in a different way. A better way, I should stipulate; its earnest effort to create constantly entertaining big-screen spectacle is appreciated in this age of lazy, jokey 200-million dollar superhero sitcoms. Whatever it is, RH:PoT is absolutely never lazy. It was a fairly expensive production for its time,*** and man, every penny of that budget ended up on the screen. The movie is jam-packed with incident, setpieces characters, elaborate sets and costumes. Unfortunately therein lies the problem; it's so damned fanatical about constantly ingratiating itself in the moment that it loses track of the big picture. It's a movie where fun stuff is constantly happening (fight scenes, evil monologues, Kevin Coster swimming in the buff, bonding, fighting, comedy, pathos) but the story never seems to build any momentum.

Or, perhaps, it spends far too much time trying to build momentum. Like many of its “dark and gritty” descendants (striking so, in fact, another way in which the movie proves shockingly prescient, even prophetic, about the shape of Hollywood franchises to come), it is cripplingly obsessed with the hero’s origins (a disastrous trend for narrative film, which would be kicked into overdrive with the STARS WARS prequel trilogy in 1999, but—crucially-- is all-but-absent from BATMAN). Hence, the torture-chamber opening; where previous Robin Hood films simply presented the familiar character fully-formed, PRINCE OF THEIVES wants to meticulously chart the course of how the character came by all his iconic trappings, from the bow to the Merry Men to the name. This takes quite a bit of time and exposition to accomplish, and even if much of it is solidly entertaining it seriously challenges the point of making a movie about Robin Hood, if for much of the runtime our hero is not yet recognizable as that character. “Robin of Locksley” doesn't become "Robin Hood" proper until well past the halfway point, and “Becoming Robin Hood” and “Doing Robin Hood Stuff” are two different story arcs which feel noticeably separate, related but not comfortably contiguous. The movie is burdened with so much backstory that once the pieces are finally in place, everything feels weirdly rushed, with the whole Hood-Nottingham conflict crammed into two huge setpieces in the movie’s back half and never given the chance to breath. When the big climax turns up (nearly 2 hours into a merciless 143 minutes**** -- apparently egregiously bloated runtimes for blockbusters are not wholly an artifact of 21st-century Hollywood) it still feels narratively too soon, like they already did a whole movie and then tried to cram its sequel into 50 minutes at the end. 

Still, credit where it's due: fun stuff is constantly happening. Even aside from the impressive action and production, it’s a hugely entertaining cast. Alan Rickman, as the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham (no Prince John here, which probably saves us a good 40 extra minutes of screentime, though at something of a cost to the story's central conflict), goes absolutely all-out mega-acting, to richly entertaining effect, and most of the rest of the cast is able to meet him at least halfway, leaning into the larger-than-life broadness of their characters. Costner makes for a notable exception; his decision to play the title character as a humble, intellectual man of action was the subject of bitter criticism when the movie premiered (with many critics comparing him unfavorably to Errol Flynn's breezy, swashbuckling take, which they apparently considered definitive). But today it seems like the obvious right choice, leaning into the actor's folksy everyman charm and allowing him to operate as the solid hub of a rather unwieldly and eccentric wheel. It's a little silly that he doesn't even take a swing at a British accent, (even Christian Slater at least tries. Or at least, I think that's what he's doing) but hell, it's a silly movie. Robin seems to become a hero because he has a nearly inhuman ability to find things to swing from in virtually any situation, like a 12th-century Spider-Man. If you can enjoy that, I don't think we really need to worry too much about the accent.

And I hope you do enjoy that, because swinging on things is very much the movie's idea of excitement. Which makes it kind of amazing that this friendly, silly, eager-to-please mainstream blockbuster was taken so seriously at the time. Despite its foundational role in the creation of the gritty, serious, realistic reboot… when you come down to it, it's hardly any of those things at all! There's, like, three nut-shots in the first half-hour. Costner and Freeman banter like Riggs and Murtaugh! Friar Tuck breaks the fourth wall! There's an out-of-the-blue cameo in the last 30 seconds! There's a huge fiery explosion that Coster has to strut away from without looking back, for Christ's sake! And I mean, it's cool enough when guys do that in modern movies where shit is exploding all the time; when the fuck is this dude in the 12th century ever gonna see anything that cool again? So double badass, there. 

Basically, I think the movie is a bit misunderstood. It's not so much an attempt to make things more realistic as it is an attempt to add a different texture to a familiar story, teasing a few new threads of meaning out of it, but mostly just having fun doodling in the margins with whatever the filmmakers thought might be cool. 

Obviously I'm in favor of that, and would like to correct the record on 1991's behalf. But if the movie is misunderstood or misremembered, I also can't necessarily say it's underrated. Like anyone trying too hard, it's not all that consistent, and a little exhausting to put up with. But it’s interesting that this fact is not what history has held against it – for better or worse, the movie, if it is remembered at all, is remembered for its pioneering, boundary-pushing “dark and gritty” approach. The fact that it self-evidently isn't either didn't matter, apparently; that was what people remembered about it anyway. Of Ebert’s complaints that the movie is "murky, unfocused, violent and depressing," the only one which is even a little true is “unfocused.” But in the movie world, perception is reality, and obviously even the timid gestures the movie makes in that direction felt significant enough to the contemporary audience to be hugely impactful – not just on the way they viewed the film, but as a potential lens to view any proposed remake or reboot. It is, I think, no coincidence at all that in 2010, we got another Robin Hood movie (this one directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russel Crowe) which leaned even harder in the direction of a “dark and gritty” origin story. After all, by that point, RH:PoT very much was your pappy’s Robin Hood – and the problem with its basic strategy is that it is by definition it loses its zest as it ceases to be surprising. And of course, you can only get so dark and gritty before the whole approach loses its impact. The next ROBIN HOOD, in 2018, took a wholly different approach, trying to mimic a very different set of aesthetic signifiers: those of the modern comic book blockbuster. All of which leaves poor PRINCE OF THEIVES as an orphaned relic of a bygone era, which blazed bright for a brief moment, and perhaps had a significant influence on the direction pop culture took in the subsequent years, but has as an independent work of art sunk into relative obscurity, even suffering the indignity of being eclipsed in the popular consciousness by its own parody, which is today almost certainly more frequently watched and better remembered.

But at least I respect its hustle. If more movies had tried to imitate that, rather than its alleged gritty realness, blockbuster history might have been shaped for the better. But oh well, at least we'll always have the merchandise. 

And, I'm sorry to remind you, a truly dire Bryan Adams song. 

 

 

* Comic books had been going in this direction for some time, since at least Frank Miller’s 1986 sweaty, fascistic grimdark The Dark Knight Returns. By the 1990’s, gritty anti-heroes like Venom and Spawn would be the rule, rather than the exception. But movies were slower to follow, flirting with the florid nihilism of comic books throughout the 90s but struggling with how –or if—to translate that energy to the big screen.

** Or so I’m told. It’s Edgar Rice Burroughs, so I feel like there’s probably a limit on how “dark and intellectual” it could be, but the consensus seems to be that GREYSTOKE is, in both tone and substance, much more faithful to the source material than previous adaptations had been. I’ll have to take their word for it since there’s no way in hell I’m reading 1912’s Tarzan of the Apes. Right? I mean, of all the things in the world to read, why would I read that? I mean, I guess, it probably would be interesting as a cultural artifact. And it’s probably pretty short. Oh shit, should I read 1912’s Tarzan of the Apes? It does sound like the kind of thing I would do, now that I see it in written out in black and white.

*** Though at $48 million, hardly record-breaking; 1989’s BATMAN had cost only a little less, and TERMINTATOR 2 cost twice as much. Only a scant four years later, Costner’s own WATERWORLD would cost $172 million.

**** And there’s also a 155-minute “extended edition,” which apparently contains even more exposition about whatever supernatural conspiracy the Sheriff of Nottingham is on about.

 

Batman Forever

 

Batman Forever (1995)

Dir. Joel Schumacher

Written by Lee Batchler, Janet Scott Batchlet, Akiva Goldsman

Starring Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Nicole Kidman, Chris O’Donnell

 

In which America sanctions a surprising amount of buffoonery.

You’ll notice I did something unusual in watching these 20^th-century Batman movies: I watched both pairs (the Burton duology and the related-but-distinct Schumacher duology) in reverse order, starting with the later film and then checking out the earlier one. This was somewhat happenstance, but it turned out to be an interesting way to view them: the rap on both duologies is that they each began with a somewhat staid first movie, while the second became a near-parodic catalog of the respective directors’ personal fetishes, to their detriment. Watching in reverse order, with the full expression of auteurial excess already on display, we can perceive more clearly what is absent from the first movie, rather than focus on the continuities between them.

 

All of which makes it kinda hilarious, in retrospect, that people loved BATMAN FOREVER when it came out and hated BATMAN & ROBIN two years later, because I can't help but notice that they're basically the exact same fucking thing. Same neon hellscapes, same duo of furiously over-acting villains, same incessant campy corniness, same nightmarish overproduction. Hell, even the Bat-nipples, so strenuously derided by the time BATMAN & ROBIN rolled around, were already clearly in evidence.* Everything people claimed to hate in the sequel was already omnipresent here.

 

There is one key difference, though: while BATMAN & ROBIN was obviously written as a comedy, FOREVER seems to have been written more or less earnestly... it's just played for comedy. Relentlessly so. As Ebert’s contemporary review remarked, “there was a feeling after ‘Batman Returns’… that the series had grown too dark and gloomy,” and one feels the movie self-consciously course-correcting in nearly every scene. Nothing is allowed to play out without being immediately undercut by some desperate mugging, even when there’s nothing even resembling a joke in the script… which is most of the time! BATMAN & ROBIN had terrible, corny jokes, but at least they were, unmistakably, jokes. FOREVER seems to have become a comedy more out of anxiety over being perceived as too serious than out of any apparent plan to be funny per se, but the result is that regardless of the actual story, nearly everything that happens is presented as if it was funny.

 

And this is a huge problem, because the only person who is ever even remotely funny is psychotic bat fetishist Nicole Kidman, who's playing her daffy character 100% straight, and seems to be the only person who isn’t aware of the buffoonery playing out around her. But this is at most a mild grace note, and is almost immediately drowned out by the maniacally overacting villains, in the form of the unlikely duo of Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey. Of the two, Carrey sucks up the most of the film’s attention; he is pitched at a frequency that can only be described as "the brown note," and is absolutely inescapable here, constitutionally unable to resist screaming and doing a weird voice and doing a wacky dance and running through sixteen different facial expressions and striking a comic pose and throwing in some kind of dumb joke, all while wearing an outfit that would make Cher blush. It's screeching, fingernails-on-a-chalkboard anti-entertainment, and it sucks up every single molecule of oxygen in the film, stopping the film dead in its tracks every time he's on-screen, which is constantly. Meanwhile Jones is so monotonous in his over-the-topness that he basically vanishes into the background, which is a pretty fitting description of the entire movie. If everything is turned up to 11, nothing is.**

 

A Batman movie is gonna live or die on its villains, and so FOREVER was doomed before it even began. But there's one other major problem on top of all that: I feel weird saying this, but for a movie so histrionic, its main problem is that nothing very interesting happens. The movie has many elaborate sets (MVP Barbara Ling of BATMAN & ROBIN infamy is doing basically the same thing here, just on a slightly smaller scale) but it has amazingly few set pieces. I’m not convinced that Batman himself does even a little bit more superheroing than he does in the infamous low-action Burton duology. It’s an oddly inert story, yet pitched at a manic tone – a mismatch that makes the whole thing feel like huge engine which is constantly revving but never drives anywhere. BATMAN & ROBIN, for all its many flaws, at least uses its garish silliness to do fun stuff. FOREVER just kind of sits there, yelling at you. 

 

So how to explain, then, the general positive response this one got at the time? Looking back, it’s a real head trip to see apparently sane people like Ebert treating this more or less as a normal movie, pointing out themes and motifs and stuff as if any of that mattered even a little bit, commenting that “Schumacher makes a generally successful effort to lighten the material” and (incorrectly) that there are “lots of laughs for the Riddler.” Everybody seems to have just accepted on faith that this was basically a normal Batman movie with a slightly lighter tone, rather than a weird camp parody which makes the 60’s Adam West Batman look solemn and dignified by comparison. I can only conclude that the mainstream still didn’t have an entirely clear idea of what camp was, or a solid idea about what a comic book movie should be – and so they simply took the script and the marketing department’s word for it that this was basically a serious Batman film with a little bit of silliness to lighten the mood. Its sequel made the mistake of assuming the audience was in on the joke, which apparently they were not, and did not appreciate being enlightened (perhaps because of the unavoidable implication that if they missed it the first time, the joke was on them). It seems crazy, but I don't have another explanation. We forget, sometimes, to what a shocking extent an audience can simply be told what to think of art, even when there’s a mountain of contradictory evidence sitting right there in front of their eyes.

 

Still, the degree to which you can tell an audience what to think has a lot to do with time and place. If you're going to gaslight them, you need to keep gaslighting them, and the subsequent sequel kinda blew it by owning up to its own silliness. Which means that in retrospect, people taking this movie seriously seem outright insane, and people enjoying it seem misguided to the point of outright fraud. Needless to say, BATMAN & ROBIN is not a good movie either, but it at least has the benefit of being entirely one thing. FOREVER, trapped between a script with no jokes and a tone so bracingly shrill that it can only play as comedy, doesn’t even have that solid foundation to fall back on. It’s all but unwatchable, a bizarre pileup of contradictory corporate notes, frantic and flop-sweating without ever producing any actual energy or momentum.*** The only appropriate response to a such a monster is the response Jones apparently had to his insufferably mugging co-star: “I hate you. I really don’t like you… I cannot sanction your buffoonery.”

 

* Schumacher later grumbled, “The bodies of the suits come from Ancient Greek Statues, which display perfect bodies. They are anatomically correct.”

100% medically accurate

 

** The heroes vanish into the background so completely that they're not even worth mentioning, except that at one point Robin does his laundry using karate. And even that isn't quite able to reach the level of sublime dumbness that it should, thanks to its manic, disruptive editing.

 

*** Interestingly, there is a fabled SnyderCut-esque “Schumacher Cut” which is reported to be less campy and more serious, potentially actually delving a little into the script’s fleeting lip service about Batman’s psychology (which intrigued Ebert enough that he opened his review by addressing it!). It’d be interesting to see, and basically anything with less Carrey and O’Connell could only be an improvement, but the essential problem that the film simply lacks incident and momentum seems unsolvable to me. We’ll see #ReleaseTheSchumacherCutIGuess         

APPENDIX A: Various Batmans or Batmen

BATMAN (1989)

BATMAN RETURNS (1992)

BATMAN FOREVER (1995)

BATMAN & ROBIN (1998)

BATMAN BEGINS (2005)

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)

BATMAN VS SUPERMAN (2016)

JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017 / 2021)

THE BATMAN (2022)

Batman & Robin

 

Batman & Robin (1997)

Dir. Joel Schumacher

Written by Akiva Goldsman

Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Uma Thurman, George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell, Alicia Silverstone

[[Originally posted on letterboxd, where most of my shorter reviews now go. Included here for posterity]]

 

In which Joel Schumacher learns the meaning of the word "Toyetic"

It's customary to begin any contemporary review of BATMAN AND ROBIN by stressing how terrible the reviewer thought it was when it came out, back in 1997. Alas, I cannot contribute to this venerable tradition, because I never saw it until now. And I probably wouldn't have seen it, except that my buddy Dan Prestwich was apparently going through some kind of latent emotional crisis and decided to undertake a thorough survey of modern Batman cinema. As his friend, I knew it was irresponsible to let him attempt such a reckless folly on his own, and so I bravely braced myself for BATMAN & ROBIN, a movie with a reputation so dismal that simply adducing its name as a comparison point is basically invoking Godwin's law.

But amazingly, everyone was wrong! Far from the expected disaster, BATMAN & ROBIN turns out to be a thoughtful and provocative high-water mark of modern pop art, crafted with the refined care of an auteur versed in the Apparatus theories of Althusser and Metz and steeped in the semiotics of nah, I'm just yanking your chain. It does suck, obviously. 

Still, 22 years of emphatic and uncontested public consensus that this movie was absolute dogshit is about the maximum possible level of expectation-lowering, and those low expectations certainly made this a much more palatable experience that it would surely have been in 1997. Being warned ahead of time about the garish ridiculousness, uber-campy tone, relentless ice puns, and bat nipples doesn't quite prepare one, emotionally, to be confronted by such things, but at least it allows a viewer to approach it in the right state of mind. Back in 1997, people somehow seemed to interpret its screeching archness as a mistake, some sort of malignant perversion of its real intent. Watching today, that archness is obviously the point, and can at least live or die on its own merits instead suffering in comparison to some imaginary version of how a film titled "Batman & Robin" should be.

Not that it's exactly any great shakes even on its own merits. The jokes are intentional, but that doesn't mean they're especially funny, and 125 minutes is a very, very long time to stay amused by what is essentially one joke, that joke being "haha, look at how campy this insanely expensive movie is." 

Still, it's a joke that's at least a little funny, and executed on a scale of Caligulan extravagance such as the world may never see again. If the pleasures of the story are slight (and they are slight to the point of being ephemeral), the pleasures of the colossal, stylized sets, wild lighting, frantic mega-acting and elaborate costumes are rather more intoxicating, at least for a while. Watching Shumacher play around in the neon-poisoned, transmogrified ruins of Tim Burton's austere modernist cityscape can occasionally even be a heady joy; witness the sequence where Batman and Freeze enjoy a lengthy car chase across the twisted body of one of Burton's colossal statues (now Schumacher-fied into an aesthetic considerably more buff and nude). In moments like this, Schumacher's complete lack of taste and restraint collide nicely with a comic book sensibility of freewheeling, fanciful vigor, and the movie becomes genuinely fun.

But those moments are pretty fleeting. Though there's certainly more action here than in either of Burton's morose modern gothics, very little of it is any good at all; it's mostly upstaged by the overwhelming mis-e-scene or just lost in the choppy, frantic editing (a grim portent of what was to come in the next decade). That leaves the actors to carry most of the movie -- which is to say, that leaves the villains to carry the movie, since after four separate Batman movies we can't at this point reasonably expect the title characters to be the real focal point of the film (though of the "Gough/Hingle quadrilogy," this is the only film to meaningfully put Batman at the center of the narrative, not that it matters much at this point). 

Thankfully, if you're relying on over-the-top charisma to anchor your movie, you could hardly do better than Schwarzenegger and Thurman (plus guest star John Glover and the absurdly over-muscled arms of wrestler Jeep Swanson). Schwarzenegger is as dialed-up as everything else in the movie, but this was his natural element, and perhaps even natural state, in 1997, playing into his strength for cheerful, energetic caricatures. Thurman, doing some kind of wild Mid-Atlantic accent and vamping it up like a coked-up Mae West, is easily the best thing in the movie (she falls into a giant venus fly trap and yells "Curses!"), entertaining on exactly the level the movie is shooting for, but without pulling so heavily from the usual bag of tricks as Arnold is. Both are compulsively watchable in almost any circumstances, and their combined enthusiasm and sheer frenetic energy bolster the movie far past the point it ought, by all rights, to start flagging. That doesn't get you quite to the end of that ridiculous 125 minutes, but it gets you much deeper into the runtime than you'd have any real business expecting.

As for the heroes, Clooney does an impressive job of looking only a little embarrassed and comfortably exuding his usual cool. He does little to stand out, but it's a testament to the actor's easy charisma that he manages to avoid entirely fading into the background in the face of so many wildly dialed-up distractions. His co-stars fare less well; O'Donnell is playing such an actively intolerable character that no actor could have really expected to save the role, but he doesn't even try. And Silverstone is giving one of the most spectacularly terrible performances in the history of English-language cinema, delivering her lines as if she's reading them phonetically, syllable-by-syllable, off a cue card that she can barely focus her eyes on. She looks legitimately confused and disoriented, like a hopeless drunk at a party desperately nodding along to pretend they follow a confusing conversation that has gotten entirely away from them.

Not that good acting was ever going to save --or even have any place in-- the outrageously exaggerated, senselessly overstuffed hodge-podge of neon and blacklight kitsch that is certainly the movie's true star. Despite the presence of actors and a script which, while dumb*, is in every way more coherent and straightforward than either of Burton's films, there is room for only one marquee star here, and that is production designer Barbara Ling (most recently of ONCE UPON A TIME IN... HOLLYWOOD), who dominates everything else to the degree that it's barely even worth mentioning anything as minor as a "plot." And just as in Burton's films, this is simultaneously the film's raison d'etre, its greatest success, and its ultimate undoing. With everything --the acting, the dialogue, the costumes, even the fucking scenery-- turned to its loudest, broadest pitch at all times, exhaustion sets in around the final 30 minutes. All the yelling eventually just fades into white noise, and what was once at least charmingly colorful and outrageous becomes kind of a drag. Which is, honestly, hardly surprising; it's actually more surprising how long the movie is able to consistently generate some level of modest pleasure than it is that it eventually flames out. 

It's still a long way from actively good, of course, but as huge-budget debacles of this scale go, it's mostly an amusing and unique enough bit of pop-art fluff that it's hard to understand the vitriol it generated at the time. It's of interest purely as an exotic cultural artifact, but modern anthropologists interested in this evolutionary dead end of the Hollywood blockbusters are likely to find it a less painful thing to endure than its reputation might lead one to believe.

Only one last thing remains to be said, and it remains my hottest, most dangerous take in what is otherwise a fairly safe review. There is one scene, and only one scene, which managed to surprise me, in this movie which features not just dancers costumed like apes, but pink apes (and, of course, two of them, because BATMAN & ROBIN would certainly never stop at just one). It is perhaps the film's least characteristic scene, a scene which has no neon light whatsoever, no campy costumes, no ice puns, no ape suits of any kind. It is merely this: Batman's beloved butler Alfred (Michael Gough, Hammer's THE HORROR OF DRACULA) has taken ill, and Bruce Wayne stops by to check on him. And Bruce simply, directly, tells the old man he loves him. 

They both know this, of course, but the gentle pleasure of Alfred's reaction, combined with the straightforward, unselfconscious sincerity of Bruce's delivery had the completely unexpected effect of slipping directly past my shell of ironic detachment and somehow making me feel a tiny twinge of real emotion, in this movie of all fool places. It's nothing major, and it has exactly zero to do with anything else in the movie (Alfred's illness barely even registers as a subplot). But it's genuinely sweet. It speaks to a different kind of movie that could have been, something which needn't have been less silly, which needn't have been anything like the oppressively, laboriously serious Nolan movies which would follow, but could have been a little more sincere. Comic books are for kids, but that doesn't mean that their simple, primary-colored emotions are shallow and easily dismissed. Quite the contrary, in fact. As modern comic book movies have increasingly settled into either the flippant (Marvel) or the ponderous (DC), this one little scene is a nice reminder that sometimes a direct approach is the best approach. You don't have to pretend this isn't a ridiculous concept to treat its essential, primal emotions seriously. It's the very ridiculousness of our emotions that lends them so well to abstract, simplistic fiction like a Batman story.

Anyway, outside that one scene, BATMAN & ROBIN comes absolutely nowhere close to doing that, which ultimately leaves it a wholly shallow, superficial thing. But as far as shallow, superficial things go, there's a lot of goofy, neat stuff on the surface to gawk at, and you could do a whole hell of a lot worse.

 

* While pointing out plot holes in BATMAN & ROBIN is beneath the dignity of a serious commentator, I do have to point out one particularly batty (ha! take that, Schwarzenegger!) detail I found rather charming: our heroes are told by Freeze (and apparently believe without question) that once a person is frozen, they have 11 minutes to unfreeze them safely. So naturally, the climax involves the city being frozen, and then it's a race against time to save the citizens of Gotham. And of course, that race against time is embodied by a literal countdown (or, in an unusual twist on this sort of thing, in this case a semi-confusing count up) on a digital clock. But fortunately our heroes arrive at Freeze's lair and wreck his machine, stopping the clock with only seconds to spare. But here's the thing; they only stop the clock, they don't actually unfreeze anyone until after a lengthy action sequence. Are they aware that time doesn't stop just because the second hand on a clock stops ticking? Anyway, it turns out I guess Freeze undersold how long you could safely stay frozen, because like 30 minutes later everyone still seems OK. 

While I have you down here, I also want to point out that before she decides to destroy the city or whatever, Poison Ivy actually comes to Bruce with a plan to green up his enterprise --which I hasten to add, actually was funding the villainous mad scientist who tried to kill her and was cooking up 'roided out super-soldiers for the highest bidder-- and he just brushes her off by smugly saying that everyone on Earth will die if they give up diesel. What the fuck, Bruce? I feel like we can try a little harder than that. Seems awful convenient for the insanely rich guy with the billion-dollar industrial empire that there's literally nothing we can possibly do for the environment and it would be stupid to even try.

APPENDIX A: Various Batmans or Batmen

BATMAN (1989)

BATMAN RETURNS (1992)

BATMAN FOREVER (1995)

BATMAN & ROBIN (1998)

BATMAN BEGINS (2005)

THE DARK KNIGHT (2008)

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)

BATMAN VS SUPERMAN (2016)

JUSTICE LEAGUE (2017 / 2021)

THE BATMAN (2022)