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Why
does George Clooney waggle his head like that when he talks?...
Robin
met Batman when Batman was Val Kilmer. One day he wakes
up and Batman is another Hollywood Man-Toy, the smug
head-waggler Clooney. And Alfred, in seeing no less than
three batmen pass through his hallowed Wayne Manor, probably
puts it down to his spiraling Alzheimer's…
I
find it strangely ironic that the major complaint with this
Batman incarnation is that it resembles a comic book –
let's all step back from our sophisticated bad selves for
a moment, folks… Batman IS a comic book. It is doubly
ironic that modern comic books exhibit a more cogent view
of "reality" - since Batman's inception in 1939
- than that which director Schumacher opted to portray in
this sophomoric film, which harks back to the inglorious
camp of the 1960's TV series, much maligned by aficionados
of the "brooding Batman" persona.
And
in camping it up, Schumacher seemed oblivious on where to
draw the line: primary colors shriek in anguish and gobos
coruscate like an LSD afternoon delight (I assume that the
DISCO BALL in the Batmobile's engine means Batman has "Knight"
Fever-?); humanly impossible feats of acrobatism abound,
contravening every physics principle mankind has worked
so hard to identify; everyone speaks simply and directly
("Freeze – you're mad!", "She's definitely
evil!", "She loves me and not you, and it's driving
you crazy", "I was the one who kicked Ivy's butt.
Yeh, that was me" – gems, one and all) with lowbrow
puns constituting over 80 percent of the egregious dialog;
henchmen and policemen as widespread as buffalo on an Oregon
plain – and just as dispensably bovine; all that's
missing are the "Kapow's" and "Blammo's"…
Stupidity
runs rampant in this movie, so outlining the plot may seem
like an exercise wasted: Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Mr. Freeze
(who becomes "bad" after falling into a vat of
cryogenic solution – er, okay), bewilderingly reaches
the conclusion he will find a cure for his frozen wife by
flash-freezing Gotham City. Ah, the Republican mind at work:
like George W. Bush's plan of furthering education for American
children by blowing up Iraqi children. Meanwhile, Uma Thurman
(playing Poison Ivy like she's on the brink of constant
orgasm) seeks to over-run the planet with her horticulture.
With the Rubber-Butted Duo to the rescue...
We
all know that Arnold can't act – but who knew he couldn't
even over-act? And Thurman, for all her pining and
puling, is a lesson in blandness. That doesn't quell the
writers relentlessly plying these two monotonal villains
with exquisitely-painful puns, eliciting uncomfortable throat-clearing
in the stead of guffaws. Place them beside the traffic-stopping
vapidness of Chris O'Donnell (Robin) and the plump insipidness
of Alicia Silverstone (Batgirl), whose lips look like two
oysters doing battle and whose costumed bosom is as unnaturally
rounded as Janet Leigh's was unnaturally pointed, and we
have a cast as formidable as any ensemble from a Police
Academy stinkbomb.
Resembling
a comic book is not a crime (illustrated by the superb visualization
of Frank Miller's Sin City); insulting our intelligence
is what earned Schumacher's Batman the prize in banality.
Of the thousands of gaffes that litter the movie, one of
the most galling is when Batman shows Freeze incriminating
footage of Ivy admitting she was Mrs. Freeze's would-be
killer. During that admission, Ivy had dispatched Robin
with a gentle push into a two-foot-deep wading pool, Batman
was tangled in vines near the ceiling and Ivy was busy kicking
Batgirl's portly butt. Yet the Bat-Palm-Pilot simply replays
footage FROM THIS MOVIE, not even trying to re-create
any "hidden-camera" authenticity.
Insults
in no discernible order: an observatory built in the heart
of the glaring city (idiotic location choice from the outset
– but during the film's climax, it is suddenly atop
a million-foot precipice); upon Batgirl's first appearance,
she larks at Batman, "Bruce it's me – Barbara!"
– oh, sorry, that meager strip of mask which covers
virtually zero percentage of your face had me irretrievably
flummoxed; Batman and Robin spending most of the second
act feebly arguing over Poison Ivy's attentions, in a vain
attempt at dispelling their image as the original Ambiguously
Gay Duo; Gotham Telescope crashing to the ground and exploding,
obviously due to the vast poundage of explosive material
that telescopes are made out of…
Schumacher
– just – didn't – care.
Then
there's Alfred asking Silverstone, supposedly in her late-teens,
"How in the world did you manage to get here all the
way from England?" Did he pose that question because
she is retarded, or because they don't have planes in England?
When
dying Alfred entrusts Silverstone with a "sacred trust"
DVD for his brother, imploring her never to open it –
though it is annoying enough that she immediately opens
it– upon discovering the secrets of the Bat-Catalog,
she apparently assimilates the complete Bat-Crimefighter
Protocol in one evening, as she turns up to get her butt
kicked by Ivy shortly thereafter, in her XXL Bat-Couture.
Then – to further the idiocy – Batman, who for
most of the movie has been badgering Robin (the professional
acrobat) about being unprepared for battle, nonchalantly
allows the out-of-shape college student Batgirl (who has
spent just one evening cramming the Batalog into her blond
brain) to participate in life-threatening battle with super-villains.
Now that's a responsible guardian!
By
the end of the movie, the costuming on the three heroes
is so garishly superfluous, so clinically hedonistic, so
tastefully atrocious, that it goes way past eye-candy and
directly to eye-myocardial-infarction, Clooney's costume
neck-bracing him like a stockaded rodeo bull, silver highlights
transversely swirling over pecs and quadriceps and Achilles-tendon
– one imagines he must feel intoxicatingly liberated
when he is free of that constricting cowl, as Bruce Wayne;
to dance and sing and compose odes to peripheral vision…
…I
guess that's why he waggles his head like that.
END
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