What Exactly Is Wrong With Batman & Robin?

The Good: Alicia Silverstone is fine, Clooney does okay, Moments of Michael Gough’s performance and Alfred’s character.
The Bad: Most of the acting, Terrible special effects, Atrocious writing, Crappy characters, Predictable plot
The Basics: Batman & Robin is easily one of the worst films of all time.


Every now and then, I try to experience something I previously experienced and did not enjoy. I like to see if the thing was as bad as I recall it being or if it was just a reaction at the time. So, for example, watching Zoolander (reviewed here!) with my wife, years after panning it, I probably did not hate it as much as I originally did. One of the first films I reviewed, back when I was writing for my college newspaper as a reviewer, was Batman & Robin. I remember it being unspeakably bad and my review rated it as such.

So, I took the flick in again, fifteen years later, to see if it was just horrible on the big screen or if, now that I have a more refined palate and standards, it was still just rotten. It was.

In fact, Batman & Robin is so bad that I can’t muster up the enthusiasm to go through one of my usual reviews of the film. The only things that really grabbed me about the movie were Alicia Silverstone (and if you just want Silverstone, there are plenty of pictures online or other, vastly better, films she is in to enjoy her actual acting ability) and a few moments of Michael Gough’s performance as Alfred. Unfortunately, though, it is also Gough who sets the pace for the movie. One of the first lines in the film is Alfred saying that he’ll have to cancel the pizza order and Gough rolls his eyes while delivering the line. It is very much as if Gough knew it was a shit line and he would be going through the motions of saying any of them throughout the film.

So, rather than go through the usual plot, character, acting, and special effects analysis of the film, I decided that I would just list the twenty-five most preposterous things in Batman & Robin. Enjoy!

25. Every line of Mr. Freeze’s sounds like a lame attempt to make an “Hasta la vista . . . baby”-style catch phrase,

24. During the proposal scene, George Clooney looks like he is reading his lines off a note on his lap,

23. Bane has no character or character development,

22. Poor John Glover! One of the most talented villain character actors appears as a ridiculous mad scientist and doesn’t pull it off convincingly,

21. Of all the characters to recur, the fact that the social newsmagazine hostess comes back is ridiculous,

20. Commissioner Gordon’s outfit makes him look more like a third world dictator than a police commissioner,

19. After the claim is made that Bruce has been dating his current woman “forever,” when she proposes, she says they have been together a year. Even for tabloids, a year is hardly “forever,”

18. Alfred ill and dying has more color in his cheeks and skin than Alfred healthy. What the hell?! Is he a reverse vampire?!,

17. Coolio has an even worse role than he does in Daredevil,

16. The computer voice changes from a stiff, mechanical computer voice into a pornstar voice when Barbara gets access to the file Alfred made,

15. Bruce Wayne witnesses Pamela Isley at a party in her mundane form when she could easily be apprehended, but does nothing,

14. Gotham’s newsmedia must be absolutely terrible. After multiple attacks and his apprehension, when Mr. Freeze attacks the observatory, one scientist has no idea who he is and the other’s solution to seeing a guy with a big freeze gun come in is to scream in comic horror. Yeah, most of the supplemental characters in this film are idiots,

13. Mr. Freeze refers to himself consistently as a villain, yet is supposed to be motivated by love,

12. Poison Ivy’s grand plan to save the plant world is to kill all of it, except her ridiculous mutants. This is not just a crazy or stupid idea, it completely nullifies what little characterization there is for the character,

11. Mr. Freeze’s henchmen are about a thousand times more ridiculous than the Penguin’s penguins,

10. After trying to get by most of the movie by performing Bruce Wayne with only his amazing smile, George Clooney gets into one of the stiffest cinematic arguments with Chris O’Donnell ever when he insists he will go after the villains alone,

9. When Barbara is hanging off the bridge, it is one of the absolute worst bluescreen shots of all time,

8. Batgirl is used to take out Poison Ivy so none of the guys punch a woman in the face,

7. The car race scene over the giant statues look like a bunch of Matchbox cars driving on a miniature,

6. The mutant plants of Poison Ivy’s are exactly what they look like: cheap puppets,

5. The introduction of Poison Ivy at the charity event is supposed to be erotic, but is executed as preposterous and anything but titillating (which is hard to do when the director is pretty much assraping Uma Thurmond with the camera,

4. Robin waits for Poison Ivy to blow her dust in his nose/mouth not once, but twice!,

3. The freeze ray special effect is so bad it looks just like what one assumes would be used in the porn parody of the film,

2. The giant statues in Gotham City have no real-world application, except to be driven over for action sequences,

1. All of the writing seems like it was done on cocktail napkins and given to the actors moments before they had to deliver each line.

There are more, but I cannot muster up the enthusiasm to waste my time writing them down.

For other live-action DC superhero works, please check out my reviews of:
The Dark Knight Trilogy
Green Lantern
Jonah Hex
Watchmen
Superman Returns
Catwoman
Batman
Supergirl
Wonder Woman

0.5/10

For other film reviews, check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Butter Is A Wonderfully Quirky Comedy Worth Watching!

The Good: Funny, Quirky, Decent acting
The Bad: Somewhat predictable plot progression.
The Basics: A ten year-old girl takes on the horrible wife of the reigning butter sculptor in Iowa in Butter!


I am always amazed by how some films manage to assemble an impressive cast without my ever hearing about the finished movie. I swear, half the independent films that are out there would do better if only people knew they existed. I don’t even recall how I heard about Butter before I sat down to watch it today. And yet, Butter has a pretty amazing cast and is a clever, funny film.

Led by Jennifer Garner and Ty Burrell, Butter is an independent film that solidly entertains. Fleshed out by the likes of Alicia Silverstone, Ashley Greene, Olivia Wilde, Rob Corddry, and Hugh Jackman, Butter uses the wealth of talent that shows up for it remarkably well.

A year before Laura and Bob Pickler find themselves in Iowa running for office, Bob is muscled out of his fifteen years of butter sculpting success. His wife is unwilling to go quietly into obscurity and raises a fuss. When she catches Bob with a stripper/prostitute, Brooke, Laura decides to enter the annual contest herself.

Paralleling Laura’s journey is Destiny, a young black orphan who is taken in by Julie and Ethan. She illustrates a real artistic aptitude, but is supported by Ethan and her school teacher to apply herself. Ethan encourages Destiny to enter the county’s butter sculpting contest. When Brooke enters as well, the contest takes a very ugly turn. Impressing her foster parents, Destiny uses butter sculpting as a social commentary as well as an artistic outlet, winning contest after contest.

Butter is hilarious for its awkward moments. The scene where Destiny and Ethan sit outside in the car coming up with the worst things that could happen if she enters the contest is laugh-out-loud funny. Yara Shahidi (Destiny) has a wonderful sense of comic timing and plays off the far more seasoned Rob Corddry (Ethan) expertly. Corddry and Alicia Silverstone play a married couple exceptionally well and they seem like plausible foster parents to Shahidi’s Destiny. Shahidi explodes onto screen as a vibrant young talent who successfully carries most of the film. Responding to the foul-mouthed admonishments of Olivia Wilde’s Brooke, Shahidi has a great poker face.

As far as acting goes, Ashley Greene steals her scenes as Kaitlen, the bratty teenage step-daughter of Laura. Hugh Jackman has little more than a cameo, but playing off him allows Jennifer Garner to deliver one of her funniest lines of the film (“He slammed into something he shouldn’t have slammed into”).

The film is somewhat predictable, quickly turning from a meandering narrative where butter sculpting is peripheral to the family life of two weird Iowan families into a war of wills where an adult becomes to determined to beat a ten year-old at a contest. It is funny, surprisingly clever and thoroughly enjoyable for anyone who likes awkward, audacious comedies that do not play it safe.

For other works with Rob Corddry, please visit my reviews of:
Warm Bodies
Cedar Rapids
Hot Tub Time Machine
W.
I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry
Failure To Launch

7.5/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2013 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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The Art Of Getting By Is Too Familiar.

The Good: Moments of character/acting/writing
The Bad: No spark, Painfully predictable plot, Unlikable characters, No superlative performances, Short but feels terribly long.
The Basics: An indie film that is completely lacking in spark, zest and originality, The Art Of Getting By is a surprising flop for all involved.


While my wife is gone for the summer, I am catching up on all the things that she does not (traditionally) enjoy watching with me. So, it’s a lot of art films and television shows that she expressed no interest in. Last night, I got my comeuppance for my strategy; I ran into a lemon that truly justified my wife’s antipathy toward art films. The movie I watched was The Art Of Getting By and it was one that I was actually looking forward to quite a bit. And when it started, I waited for it to go somewhere, I waited for the spark of originality, zest . . . anything that would keep me excited about watching the movie.

That never came.

Unfortunately, The Art Of Getting By is a small, artsy film that presents absolutely nothing new to cinema and, in the worst tradition of pretentious films, is surprisingly short, but feels oppressively long. The Art Of Getting By is in no way surprising, save that it manages to waste the talent of Blair Underwood, minimize Ann Dowd, and presents a character played by Emma Roberts who is virtually impossible to watch. Writer and director Gavin Wiesen made a film that is disturbingly predictable that put talented actors and actresses in some of their most bland, disappointing roles to date. That’s almost a talent.

George is a high school student at a New York City school where he is failing all of his classes because he knows that someday he is going to die anyway, so, he figures, what is the point? Having made it to Senior year alone, he is constantly being sent to the principal’s office for infractions against the school’s rules and when he takes the hit for Sally smoking on the roof of the school, he draws the attention of Sally Howe. Sally thinks George is weird, but she believes he needs a friend and she makes an effort to be that friend, much to George’s delight.

When Principal Martinson conscripts George to act as a guide to an alumni artist, Dustin, brought in to speak to the current class, George and Dustin bond. When George and Sally visit Dustin’s studio, Dustin expresses interest in Sally, but agrees to stay away from her for George’s sake. As George’s home life falls apart and his teachers demand he get all his work in or they will unanimously fail him, George reaches out to Sally, but may articulate his feelings too late for it to matter.

At least, that is what The Art Of Getting By would have you believe. The Art Of Getting By tries to dangle the possibility that George will fail out of high school, not get the girl of his dreams and, through pretty loaded dialogue with Dustin where he admits he has never done so, not paint a picture. Note to indie filmmakers: If you want realistic suspension of disbelief in your audience, stop putting the answers right on the movie posters!

But far more than any sort of problem with the promotion of The Art Of Getting By, the film suffers from its own stifling mediocrity. I agonized for a while watching the film (it is always a bad thing when I am metaconscious, concerned with the review during the viewing, especially when it is a movie I was excited about watching!) about the rating and I was stuck on a 4 for quite some time, but then characters did predictably loathsome things – Sally lied to George at a party, Dustin finds himself charmed by Sally, Sally laughs at George for waking up with morning wood – or act in ways that reflect more of how Hollywood perceives outsider youth than actually creating genuine characters (George does not seem particularly inclined to succumb to peer pressure, yet starts drinking at a party) and I was down to a 3. But then there were moments that I was actually pleased by in the writing and acting, most of which came very near the end. Perhaps the most benign example of this (not a real spoiler!) is when the art teacher hugs George. Moments like that that sensibly defy today’s conventions and they work . . . but the movie took a terribly long time to get around to them.

While George lacks a real spark to be interesting or different from other indie film, nihilistic artist types, The Art Of Getting By could have been saved by Sally. It is not. It is unclear what Wiesen is attempting to say with the film, but the moments of insight he has with George are entirely lacking with Sally. Young people who despise the direction their parents’ lives went in and are both smart and aware of those issues tend not to leap wholeheartedly into making those same mistakes. Yet, in The Art Of Getting By, Sally does just that.

Perhaps Gavin Wiesen wants the viewer to know that everyone will sell out. For a film on the indie film circuit, The Art Of Getting By might well be the ultimate sell-out film. I’m not even talking about the resolution to the film that puts George in a position where he has to decide if he will spend the last three weeks of his high school career doing a year’s worth of work. No, that was completely set-up to be a sell-out. George, though, is disappointingly spineless throughout the movie. While he is established as a character who has absolutely no problem standing up to authority and he is able to be honest with Sally at various points – especially about Dustin – at the key moment when George is most angry at Dustin, he is the least forthright about the professional artist’s work. At the time when it would be most humanly reasonable for George to tell Dustin he thinks that he is a hack, The Art Of Getting By cops out with the safest of lies and it makes no sense from a psychological perspective.

Unfortunately, in addition to having problematic inconsistencies in the characterizations of Sally and George, The Art Of Getting By is surprisingly unimpressive on the acting front. Emma Roberts, who has wowed me in every other work I have seen her in, is understated and her performance feels inorganic. When Sally tells George he is weird, Roberts presents it with a forced, listless quality, as if she knows it is a bad line that does not actually fit the character. Similarly, Freddie Highmore brings nothing extraordinary to the role of George. Instead, he easily establishes George, but for a character who “fears life” (that was a line Highmore really stepped on), Highmore fails to present George in a way that makes him either interesting or makes his transformation feel at all organic.

Now on DVD and Blu-Ray, The Art Of Getting By includes a commentary track with Gavin Wiesen, but because of how disappointed I was with the source material, I could not muster up the enthusiasm to watch the film again just to listen to the commentary track. There are two featurettes and the trailer, none of which improve The Art Of Getting By. The Art Of Getting By is an all-around disappointing film that absolutely failed to impress me on any level.

For other works with Emma Roberts, visit my reviews of:
It’s Kind Of A Funny Story
Valentine’s Day
America’s Sweethearts
Blow

3.5/10

For other film reviews, be sure to check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Excessively Crummy: Excess Baggage Is An Overall Disappointment.

The Good: ?, the Actors, but not the acting
The Bad: Lack of characterization, crummy plot, atrocious dialogue, lowbrow humor.
The Basics: There is no one in this world I hate enough to recommend they waste their time watching this Excess Baggage.

When I was still in college, I had the good fortune of being able to review movies for the school newspaper. That meant I was reimbursed for my ticket price and saw films for free. Excess Baggage was the only film I was condemned to that I truly wanted my money back from. It's also the only one I was never reimbursed from. I still feel terribly cheated.

If all of this seems unnecessary, now you know how I felt watching Excess Baggage. There was not a single redeeming thing about this movie and everything about the movie felt excessive (the over the top acting, the depth to which the film insults the viewer's intelligence) or unnecessary (about half the scenes, having such a talented cast - this crappy script could have been made with unknown actors and still done as well as it did).

Emily is the daughter of an exceptionally rich businessman, who neglects her. Spoiled and bored, Emily connives her way into his attention through various stunts. Unfortunately for her, her latest attempt to garner his attention comes when something truly does go wrong for her, at about the time her father and Ray are figuring out that she cries wolf quite a bit. As a result, Emily locks herself in the trunk of her car and makes a fake ransom call to her father, but soon discovers that she is truly being abducted.

Vincent, a car thief, sees her pricey car and steals it with Emily in the trunk. When Emily is released, she convinces Vincent to keep her around and make the abduction as real as possible, leaving Ray frantic to get his daughter back. On the run, Emily and Vincent develop a romantic relationship and Emily does her best to grow out of her need for her father's attention, taking Vincent's reluctant affection instead.

I volunteered to review this film originally because I hadn't seen anything with Alicia Silverstone in it and because I loved Benicio Del Toro in the magnificent The Usual Suspects. Sadly, there is nothing so grand here.

First, the plot of Excess Baggage is obvious and as predictable as it is dumb. From the moment Emily and Vincent square off it becomes "That Kind Of Movie," the type of stupid romantic comedy that tries to pair two people together through a reckless road trip. The moment they face one another, anyone with half a brain will know that they will begin to become closer and closer and they will end up in a romantic relationship of some sort. Sadly, the flick never becomes smart enough do anything even remotely surprising in that regard and anyone who has seen any movie of the type will see the middle and end a mile away. There is nothing fresh or new here.

Second, none of the characters pop or are even remotely interesting. I'm someone with a wealth of father issues, so I have no problem saying that Emily's character makes no sense. She craves her father's attention, yet has everything in the world she could want outside that. Indeed, far more compelling and intriguing for a character like this would have been circumstances where Emily traditionally got away with a lot of things because her father was not around and paying attention and in this instance, she ended up involved in something that she could not easily extricate herself from as a result. Then, actually needing her father to come through would have been harrowing and interesting.

I suppose, though, that that might not have made for as good of a romantic comedy. Truth be told, though, it couldn't have made this movie worse; finding the humor in a situation of real desperation might just have sold it better.

Vincent is pretty much the generic "guy from the wrong side of the tracks" and as a result, he does not have so much character as he embodies a type. Through the course of the "adventure" he and Emily learn from one another . . . and the viewer does not care. Benicio del Toro plays Vincent and he does so without any of the quirky brilliance that made his role of Fenster in "The Usual Suspects" brilliant and likable. Instead, here he is dull and uninspired.

Similarly, Christopher Walken, who plays Ray, lacks less pep than he had in the music video for "Weapon Of Choice."

But much of the movie falls upon Alicia Silverstone to sell and sadly she falls down on that front. I've seen interviews with Silverstone and she is quite smart and together. She is actually someone who - outside the over-the-top Hollywood good looks - makes one wish that you could meet her in real life and start a conversation because she does seem so down-to-earth, smart and all-around lovely. But in Excess Baggage, she is alternately stiff and lost, making her performance desperate to try to get a laugh or make a point and she just collapses under the weight of trying so hard.

It doesn't help Silverstone that the script is absolutely terrible, making it a tough sell to try to act with it. But here she doesn't even get the opportunity to shine, she just shows up.

My advice instead of watching Excess Baggage would be to pick up The Usual Suspects and watch the Aerosmith video "Crazy." That gets the two top billed actors doing something far more intelligent than this stupid "rich girl tries to ransom herself but it goes horribly awry" flick.

For other romantic comedies, please check out my reviews of:
Valentine's Day
Going The Distance

1/10

For more film reviews, please check out my index page!

© 2010, 2008, 2001 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.



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