Batman And Robin (ZERO STARS)
How do you compare nothing to nothing? Sure, this movie gets zero stars--deservedly--but in a way, I like it better than the zero stars I gave to Batman Forever. For one thing, it's so awful it's sporadically quoteable. Ah, but why try to damn it with faint praise, when I can damn it with vitriolic outrage instead? Let's begin my longest rant yet...
The Acting: Uma Thurman should never play chicks who are supposedly hot. Her hotness--if any, and that's highly debatable--comes from the fact that she looks cute in a weird way. So anytime I see her trying to vamp it up like she's Jean Harlow or some shit, I want to fucking puke. Alicia Silverstone, who was hot only in the context of Aerosmith videos whose music is so bad that you're forced to focus only on your sense of sight, shifts and boomerangs in weight and density in her role as Batgirl more than that biomechanical monster changes in Akira. But she's not even the "real" Batgirl (Jim Gordon's daughter)--now she's Alfred's neice. I guess they figured Police Commissioner Pat Hingle was so fucking fat and homely that he could never conceivably get laid, or if he did impregnate someone his daughter (if there ever was one) was aborted and flushed down the same toilet as the mulatto Two-Face daughter who never knew who her real daddy was, Billy Dee or Tommy Lee. Okay, that was pretty harsh, but I'm not finished. Then we have Elle McPhearson, inhabiting a character with all the drives, ambition, opinions, and cognitive skills of an eleven-year-old girl. Her dating rationale is something along the lines of, "We've been going out for a year. We have to get married, Bruce." I don't remember exactly, but it was retarded. This whole movie's retarded. I haven't even slammed the male actors yet...so let's move onto...
The Story: Hoooooo Doctor. What a Cleveland Steamer. First you've got Robin, who's poutier than a chicken-head faggot because he doesn't have his own Robin signal. Huh, really? You think that's believable character motivation, Shumacher? Huh. Let me posit this theory to you, then: Alyas Batman en Robin--the Fillipino musical version of Batman that has scenes where Batman snaps people's necks mixed in with scenes of a midget in a Spider-Man costume (I'm not kidding) and where Joker and Penguin sing a song called "I'm Mr. Joker and I'm Mr. Penguin" while they rob a fucking bank--Alyas Batman en Robin captured the Batman mythos better than this movie. Robin's whining about not having a signal??? HE'S FUCKING ROBIN!!! But maybe he has reason to whine, because Chris O'Donnel, unlike Mark Wahlberg, didn't realize that, as second fiddle, it was his duty to carry George Clooney through the movie. Clooney's had exactly two good film performances: the excellent From Dusk Till Dawn, which I saw twice on opening day it was so funny, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which I made my Dad see with me in Ireland a month before it came out in the States, because the trailer looked so good. But he had good directors in those movies, and when he doesn't have a good director to inspire his sorry ass, he needs a good croney to prop us his sorry ass. Chris O'Donnel couldn't prop up his dick even with the help of Minnie Driver and her whole Circle of Friends. So there Clooney is in the cape and cowl, and the thought going through everyone's mind is? You guessed it--"Hey, that's George Clooney." When he says, "Hi, Freeze, I'm Batman," he redefined laziness for all time. Gone was any sense of character, menace, heroism--there was just some douchebag in a Batman costume. He wasn't even good as Bruce Wayne, millionaire playboy, because he was tied down in a faggoty relationship, and unlike Val Kilmer, Michael Keaton, or even Adam West, there isn't even a hint of vengeful passion or insane fire behind those droopy eyes. There was one ray of sunshine in this movie, though...Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Mister Freeze became the Jar-Jar of this movie--the much-maligned element that, however bad it sucks--becomes the one watchable thing on screen, for its car-wreck value if nothing else. And Akiva Goldsman wrote for him every bad freeze, cold, or ice-related line that could ever exist, except for the one good one out there--"Ice to see you," from the Simpsons. John Glover plays Jason Woodrue, who is supposed to be Floronic Man, but somehow I don't think that character will creep into Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan's new Batman franchise. Ever. It's appropriate that the character Bane is in the movie, since, like Batman's spine before it, he helped break this franchise's back. Which brings us to...
The Direction: Who is the biggest no-talent douche in Hollywood? Well, actually Edward Zwick is--have you seen Legends of the Fall or The Last Samurai?--but behind him is Joel Schumacher, who probably likes being behind other men come to think of it. Let's be scientific about this. Here you have a movie that has "the hockey team from hell"--a bunch of ice-skating goons who either skated all the way to a heist at a museum OR actually took the time to put on ice skates when they got there. Wow. Then there's the line, "No sign of beauty..." which is followed by "but there's the beast," when Bane shows up. But let's rewind for a second and just suppose that Robin had said that line with no intimation that Bane was anywhere near. How many superheroes do you know (other than Speedball the Masked Marvel) who would be looking for a supervillainess and tell his or her crime-fighting partner, "No sign of beauty." Then there's Poison Ivy's mind-control pheremones. I'll allow that there could be such a thing as mind-control pheremones, but gay, pink, sparkly ones? Then there's the multitude of leather-fetish crotch shots, because wasn't Schumacher a fucking hairdresser before he turned director? HOW DOES THIS FUCKING HAPPEN, GOD? And why does every interior set look like a disco-slash-bad rave, when every exterior set look like an architecturally-impossible homage to Blade Runner, only with giant statues everywhere that make no sense whatsoever? When there's a fucking car chase in the Batmobile, and you can see hobbits in elven boats drifting by the feet of the building, it's never a good sign. I think the conceit behind this movie is, "We made a shitty movie called Batman Forever, which was a self-parody of two successful movies before it. It did well financially, so logically we must make a movie that is a parody of a parody. It need not be believable in any way, because in these troubled times, people obviously want fantasy over reality. Therefore, we must create a fantasy that is so detached from reality, that it gains its own reality, and then we must destroy even that reality during the course of the movie by interjecting scenes of a Batman credit card, Uma Thurman in a pink monkey suit, and--yes--even a Robin signal." Now, let's assume all of this was true that I just wrote, and that was their reasoning all along. It's insane, but almost noble in its ambiition. Why, then, does this movie end like THE LAST FUCKING MOVIE ENDED, EXACTLY?!?! Batman saves the day by shooting a bat-grappling hook to catch himself, and then Batman and Robin (now joined by Batgirl) run towards the camera out of the Bat-signal...rr...riiiighht. To quote Tequila in Hard Boiled: "BULLSHAAAAT!!!"
Overall: "They say that revenge is a dish best served cold...well put on your Sunday finest, for tonight we FEAST!"..."Adam...and Evil."..."Take two of these, and call me in the morning."..."BATMAN: I love you old man."..."Winter...has come at last." Akiva Goldsman went on after penning these nuggets of gold to win the Academy Award for best screenplay for that pointless turd of a move A Beautiful Mind. Joel Schumacher continues to make movies, and his adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera (say, wasn't that a Robert Englund movie?) is coming out soon. Thusly I prove once and for all that the Oscars are meaningless and the Hollywood system is irreparably fucked up. Worst of all? Batman and Robin wasn't a financial disaster. It made money. I gave it money, because my friends dragged me to the theater (and I remember that time when Kelly walked out and none of us thought he was coming back). Maybe Batman Begins will work like Memento and erase away my memories of the Schumacher era of Batman. Let us pray.
Tredekka Rules:
The Acting: Uma Thurman should never play chicks who are supposedly hot. Her hotness--if any, and that's highly debatable--comes from the fact that she looks cute in a weird way. So anytime I see her trying to vamp it up like she's Jean Harlow or some shit, I want to fucking puke. Alicia Silverstone, who was hot only in the context of Aerosmith videos whose music is so bad that you're forced to focus only on your sense of sight, shifts and boomerangs in weight and density in her role as Batgirl more than that biomechanical monster changes in Akira. But she's not even the "real" Batgirl (Jim Gordon's daughter)--now she's Alfred's neice. I guess they figured Police Commissioner Pat Hingle was so fucking fat and homely that he could never conceivably get laid, or if he did impregnate someone his daughter (if there ever was one) was aborted and flushed down the same toilet as the mulatto Two-Face daughter who never knew who her real daddy was, Billy Dee or Tommy Lee. Okay, that was pretty harsh, but I'm not finished. Then we have Elle McPhearson, inhabiting a character with all the drives, ambition, opinions, and cognitive skills of an eleven-year-old girl. Her dating rationale is something along the lines of, "We've been going out for a year. We have to get married, Bruce." I don't remember exactly, but it was retarded. This whole movie's retarded. I haven't even slammed the male actors yet...so let's move onto...
The Story: Hoooooo Doctor. What a Cleveland Steamer. First you've got Robin, who's poutier than a chicken-head faggot because he doesn't have his own Robin signal. Huh, really? You think that's believable character motivation, Shumacher? Huh. Let me posit this theory to you, then: Alyas Batman en Robin--the Fillipino musical version of Batman that has scenes where Batman snaps people's necks mixed in with scenes of a midget in a Spider-Man costume (I'm not kidding) and where Joker and Penguin sing a song called "I'm Mr. Joker and I'm Mr. Penguin" while they rob a fucking bank--Alyas Batman en Robin captured the Batman mythos better than this movie. Robin's whining about not having a signal??? HE'S FUCKING ROBIN!!! But maybe he has reason to whine, because Chris O'Donnel, unlike Mark Wahlberg, didn't realize that, as second fiddle, it was his duty to carry George Clooney through the movie. Clooney's had exactly two good film performances: the excellent From Dusk Till Dawn, which I saw twice on opening day it was so funny, and O Brother Where Art Thou?, which I made my Dad see with me in Ireland a month before it came out in the States, because the trailer looked so good. But he had good directors in those movies, and when he doesn't have a good director to inspire his sorry ass, he needs a good croney to prop us his sorry ass. Chris O'Donnel couldn't prop up his dick even with the help of Minnie Driver and her whole Circle of Friends. So there Clooney is in the cape and cowl, and the thought going through everyone's mind is? You guessed it--"Hey, that's George Clooney." When he says, "Hi, Freeze, I'm Batman," he redefined laziness for all time. Gone was any sense of character, menace, heroism--there was just some douchebag in a Batman costume. He wasn't even good as Bruce Wayne, millionaire playboy, because he was tied down in a faggoty relationship, and unlike Val Kilmer, Michael Keaton, or even Adam West, there isn't even a hint of vengeful passion or insane fire behind those droopy eyes. There was one ray of sunshine in this movie, though...Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Mister Freeze became the Jar-Jar of this movie--the much-maligned element that, however bad it sucks--becomes the one watchable thing on screen, for its car-wreck value if nothing else. And Akiva Goldsman wrote for him every bad freeze, cold, or ice-related line that could ever exist, except for the one good one out there--"Ice to see you," from the Simpsons. John Glover plays Jason Woodrue, who is supposed to be Floronic Man, but somehow I don't think that character will creep into Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan's new Batman franchise. Ever. It's appropriate that the character Bane is in the movie, since, like Batman's spine before it, he helped break this franchise's back. Which brings us to...
The Direction: Who is the biggest no-talent douche in Hollywood? Well, actually Edward Zwick is--have you seen Legends of the Fall or The Last Samurai?--but behind him is Joel Schumacher, who probably likes being behind other men come to think of it. Let's be scientific about this. Here you have a movie that has "the hockey team from hell"--a bunch of ice-skating goons who either skated all the way to a heist at a museum OR actually took the time to put on ice skates when they got there. Wow. Then there's the line, "No sign of beauty..." which is followed by "but there's the beast," when Bane shows up. But let's rewind for a second and just suppose that Robin had said that line with no intimation that Bane was anywhere near. How many superheroes do you know (other than Speedball the Masked Marvel) who would be looking for a supervillainess and tell his or her crime-fighting partner, "No sign of beauty." Then there's Poison Ivy's mind-control pheremones. I'll allow that there could be such a thing as mind-control pheremones, but gay, pink, sparkly ones? Then there's the multitude of leather-fetish crotch shots, because wasn't Schumacher a fucking hairdresser before he turned director? HOW DOES THIS FUCKING HAPPEN, GOD? And why does every interior set look like a disco-slash-bad rave, when every exterior set look like an architecturally-impossible homage to Blade Runner, only with giant statues everywhere that make no sense whatsoever? When there's a fucking car chase in the Batmobile, and you can see hobbits in elven boats drifting by the feet of the building, it's never a good sign. I think the conceit behind this movie is, "We made a shitty movie called Batman Forever, which was a self-parody of two successful movies before it. It did well financially, so logically we must make a movie that is a parody of a parody. It need not be believable in any way, because in these troubled times, people obviously want fantasy over reality. Therefore, we must create a fantasy that is so detached from reality, that it gains its own reality, and then we must destroy even that reality during the course of the movie by interjecting scenes of a Batman credit card, Uma Thurman in a pink monkey suit, and--yes--even a Robin signal." Now, let's assume all of this was true that I just wrote, and that was their reasoning all along. It's insane, but almost noble in its ambiition. Why, then, does this movie end like THE LAST FUCKING MOVIE ENDED, EXACTLY?!?! Batman saves the day by shooting a bat-grappling hook to catch himself, and then Batman and Robin (now joined by Batgirl) run towards the camera out of the Bat-signal...rr...riiiighht. To quote Tequila in Hard Boiled: "BULLSHAAAAT!!!"
Overall: "They say that revenge is a dish best served cold...well put on your Sunday finest, for tonight we FEAST!"..."Adam...and Evil."..."Take two of these, and call me in the morning."..."BATMAN: I love you old man."..."Winter...has come at last." Akiva Goldsman went on after penning these nuggets of gold to win the Academy Award for best screenplay for that pointless turd of a move A Beautiful Mind. Joel Schumacher continues to make movies, and his adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera (say, wasn't that a Robert Englund movie?) is coming out soon. Thusly I prove once and for all that the Oscars are meaningless and the Hollywood system is irreparably fucked up. Worst of all? Batman and Robin wasn't a financial disaster. It made money. I gave it money, because my friends dragged me to the theater (and I remember that time when Kelly walked out and none of us thought he was coming back). Maybe Batman Begins will work like Memento and erase away my memories of the Schumacher era of Batman. Let us pray.
Tredekka Rules:
- Rule 6: Over The Top Acting Award--I got to give one point to Arnie for giving it "the cold...college try"? Uh? Uh? +1 point.
- Rule 17: The "Don't Fuck With The Fourth Wall" Penalty...yeah, and I wouldn't advise running towards the fourth wall at the end of every movie, either. -1 star.
- Rule 20: Don't Give Me An Ice Cream Headache...Uh? Uh? -1 star.
- Rule 34: The Superhero Movie Handicap--I would almost waive this, since this is pretty fucking far from being a superhero movie, but fuck it. No mercy. -1 star.
- Rule 37: Any Film Directed By Joel Shitmaker, -1 star.
Tredekka Score: (ZERO STARS)
posted by Tredekka at 9:36 AM
1 Comments:
I regret coming back to that movie everyday of my life.
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