This is not the worst movie ever made. It’s not even the worst Batman movie ever made. It’s not even the worst Batman movie of the 90s. EVERYBODY shit-talks this one, but I say it’s the kind of camp-tastic superhero flick that our pop culture needs. Geek Nation takes superheroes so seriously these days, but Batman & Robin is a glow-in-the-dark reminder of an uncomfortable truth, which is that Batman is fucking stupid. Anyone who thinks that Batman is serious literature probably hasn’t read any serious literature. Batman is pulp. Even the most serious Batman stories ever (I LOVE Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One) are just refined trash. Batman has a beginning, but he has no ending. Bob Kane never killed him off. That’s not part of the myth. The saga of Batman is forever open-ended. So, he can be anything. He can be hard-boiled and tortured. He can also be a goofball with nipples sculpted into impossibly cumbersome armor. Batman is whatever pop culture demands him to be at the time. It all works.
Don’t get me wrong, though. This isn’t a good movie. This isn’t a smart movie. If it ever had an interesting script, it got buried long ago under a truckload of money and a convoluted maze of rewrites. It’s classic Hollywood bloat. A flabby, stupid, clumsy sloth of a film. It kills brain cells like Jason Vorhees kills comely young campers. I’m a little embarassed to even be writing in a positive way about this raging bonfire of complete idiocy.
Somehow though, that only makes it more perfect. Schumacher pushes his flamboyant vision to the limits here. He’s not rebelling against the Hollywood machine; no, he works with it—and he makes it work for him. Schumacher gets in all of the neon that he wanted, I have no doubt. It’s an improvement on the previous film, which merely WANTS to be a camp classic, but then tries to be a credible action movie (with mediocre results). Batman & Robin, by contrast, is nutzoid all-around. Adam West and Burt Ward would fit right into this. Its grand action sequences come peppered with absurd moments, with my favorite being how Batman and Robin’s costumes are revealed to be built with hidden ice skates that pop out in their battle against the nefarious Mr. Freeze, who creates a world of frost everywhere he goes.
Schumacher constantly goes for the laugh. You can’t make any joke about how ridiculous it all is that The Schu-Man doesn’t make first and better. He should never apologize for this film, however unfashionable it may be. This is as valid an interpretation of Batman as any other.