Batman & Robin, 25 Years Later: Embrace the Cheese

[Ubiquitous]

If ever there was a year that could be called the year of the summer
blockbuster, it would almost certainly have to be 1997. Not only was it the
year of Men In Black, Jurassic Park: The Lost World, and Air Force One, it
was also the mainstream peak of arguably the wildest career any actor has
ever had, as Nicolas Cage would gift us with both Con Air and Face/Off. Not
only were these films smash hits in financial terms, but they were also
well-crafted pieces of cinema that in most cases are still enjoyed to this
day. Also released that summer was perhaps one of the most infamous films
ever made: Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin.

Being all of about four years old in the summer of 1997, Batman & Robin was a
film I wouldn't see for myself until much later on in life. But it was one
that I inevitably heard about, usually in a way that almost felt like I was
hearing about an urban legend: a film of almost mythical levels of awfulness,
one that made a superhero whose name practically meant "cool" into a
laughingstock and turned a fairly successful film franchise into the
Hollywood equivalent of radioactive waste. So when I first took the plunge
and saw Batman & Robin somewhere in the ballpark of five years ago, I was
prepared for the worst.

And... I honestly loved every minute of it. Mind you, I was doubled over with
laughter pretty much the whole time, but there was hardly a moment where I
wasn't thoroughly entertained. Yes, by virtually every metric Batman & Robin
is an awful film. It's the film that topped Empire's reader-voted list of "50
Worst Films Ever Made". It's a film one of our own writers called "one of the
worst, perhaps the worst, blockbuster of the '90s." It's a film that Joel
Schumacher has flat-out apologized for making.

But, it's also a film that dares to not only say that there might be
something a little absurd about a rich guy who spends his nights dressing up
as a bat to fight criminals, but that the absurdity is something that should
be fully embraced and celebrated. It's an utterly ridiculous film that wears
its ridiculousness like a badge of honor. And finally, it's a film that in
2022 is a bizarrely refreshing antidote to modern superhero films, as the
genre feels increasingly weighed down by the need to try and establish itself
as more serious fare.

Batman Forever found Joel Schumacher blending the campy tone of '60s Batman
with the gothic grandeur of '80s Batman, drenching the whole thing in neon
and letting Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey loose to see who could chew the
most scenery. Batman & Robin is that same formula being twisted into full-
blown insanity. When you get to about a quarter of the way into the film to
see Uma Thurman performing a burlesque dance while sensually removing a
gorilla costume, then about five minutes later find Batman and Robin in the
middle of a bidding war for her affections capped off by Batman pulling out a
themed credit card from his utility belt and quipping "never leave the cave
without it," you realize that we haven't just jumped the shark, we've jumped
the exploding shark that Adam West barely escaped in the '60s with the help
of his trusty Shark Repellent Bat-Spray--seriously, '60s Batman is a genuine
masterpiece, and if you haven't already watched it you're doing yourself a
disservice.

The film feels like a constant game of escalation, continually topping itself
in terms of sheer audacity and ridiculousness: we go from Robin crashing
through a museum door on his motorcycle and leaving behind a perfect
silhouette of the Robin symbol to Mr. Freeze freezing a dinosaur skeleton and
shouting "What killed the dinosaurs? The Ice Age!" to Batman and Robin midair
surfing on doors broken off of a space capsule to somehow survive a thirty
thousand foot drop in about a five-minute timespan. The characters--well,
more like caricatures--are equally ridiculous, from George Clooney's
Batman--the _third_ actor to take on the role in the same franchise _and_
same continuity--to Uma Thurman's "Mae West but somehow _more_ provocative"
take on Poison Ivy to a version of Bane that's basically Frankenstein's
monster in a luchador mask, and the Gotham City they all inhabit feels more
like a funhouse than an actual city. Roads zigzag across each other miles
above the ground, giant statues seemingly adorn every building, and the
ground level appears to be overrun by metrosexual biker gangs. It's not so
much tonal whiplash as much as it is an onslaught on any part of your brain
trying to logically process what you're seeing, all you can do is hope to
hang on from one moment to the next.

Meanwhile, one finds oneself asking questions throughout the film: how is
Alfred--who is apparently _dying_--able to not only record a message for
Barbara in anticipation of her finding the Batcave, but also make her a
perfectly fitted Batgirl costume? Why did Mr. Freeze decide his gang's
aesthetic would be "post-apocalyptic Mad Max style biker gang on ice skates
with Slipknot masks and skull codpieces"? Did Batman, in full costume, go
down to the Bank of Gotham to apply for his credit card? None of these
questions are ever explored, leaving one with an almost existential sense of
awe and horror at just how deep the rabbit hole of absurdity goes.

Watching Batman & Robin today, twenty-five years after its release, it's more
than understandable why this is the film that killed off the Batman film
franchise for close to ten years. The character was well into the dark,
serious phase of his existence, ignited by both Frank Miller's The Dark
Knight Returns and the first two Batman films, and between Arnold
Schwarzenegger's increasingly awful puns and the infamously prominent nipples
on the Batsuit, Batman & Robin is a film that at times feels like it's
mocking you for trying to take anything about it seriously.

So why do I love this film? Part of it is certainly a matter of taste--I am
certainly someone who has been known to savor an objectively bad film from
time to time. Part of it is a matter of expectation--after hearing about how
bad it was for so long, it was a film I approached in the mindset of not
taking any of it seriously and embracing the badness of it all.

But, part of it is almost certainly that I'm getting a little exhausted with
the current state of superhero movies, which currently feel like they're in a
late teens/early twenties "we demand to be taken seriously" phase. The
current batch of post Infinity War/Endgame MCU films feels particularly
guilty of this: fun seems to be falling by the wayside in favor of stories
centered around its heroes trying to deal with the aftermath of mass trauma,
films are starting to border on overstuffed as multi-hero crossovers become
the norm instead of a novelty, and most egregious of all, every film has an
inescapable feel of being part of an installment plan of sorts, demanding
that you invest your future money and time to see what comes next or how it
fits into the bigger picture that might not take shape until _years_ down the
line. It's to the point that films are being _retroactively_ made part of
cinematic universes--Michael Keaton's version of Batman is set to return in
the upcoming Flash movie as part of a "multiversal adventure" to integrate
his version of the character into the DC Extended Universe.

Don't get me wrong--I still absolutely love the MCU and its films, Dr.
Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in particular is one of the best movies
I've seen all year. But I can't deny how refreshing it feels to watch a film
that doesn't feel like it wants anything more out of me beyond enjoying it.
There's no TV series I have to watch to know what's going on, and while it
does end with a typical "the Dynamic Trio is off to more adventures!" shot,
there's no lingering sense of "wait five years to see how everything comes
together it'll be super cool we promise!"

As for Batman, there's an argument to be made that out of those first four
films, Batman & Robin is the one that continues to have the most influence on
cinematic incarnations of Batman, in an entirely negative sense: every single
version of Batman on film has grown increasingly darker and more quote,
"realistic" in an attempt to distance themselves from any chance of
approaching Batman & Robin's campy tone--in particular, the Bale-led trilogy
seemed to go well out of its way to spend time giving technical explanations
for all of its gadgets to try and feel more grounded. Again, I still
absolutely enjoyed those films--The Batman in particular is another personal
favorite of mine. But there's more than a little bit of truth to what was
noted in one review of the film: that it felt like somewhere along the line,
someone decided that Batman movies should no longer be fun.

Batman & Robin captures something that feels increasingly lost in modern
superhero films: a sense of escapism, of creating a world with only a passing
resemblance to our own that can completely take you away from reality for an
hour and a half. Sometimes--perhaps selfishly--I don't want a superhero film
to be about trying to deal with the trauma of a massive, cataclysmic event
when everyone I know is trying to deal with the trauma of a real-life
massive, cataclysmic event.

Batman & Robin is certainly what most people would consider to be a bad
movie. But what a gloriously bad movie it is. It's not simply a bad superhero
movie: it's the best bad superhero movie ever made. It's the genre's
equivalent of The Rocky Horror Picture Show--both a masterpiece of camp and a
celebration of the inherent absurdity found in its source material. It's also
a film that feels more and more like a relic of a bygone era. While I'm
hoping that Thor: Love & Thunder is the start of the MCU starting to move on
from the lingering trauma of Infinity War/Endgame's events, future Batman
films are almost certainly going to stay firmly in the realm of the grim,
dark and intense. I don't ask that anyone else love or even necessarily enjoy
Batman & Robin, but if you let go of your expectations and appreciate it for
what it is--an hour and a half of cheesy, campy, clinically insane fun--then
who knows: you just might find it to be more entertaining than you remember.

--
Let's go Brandon!