25 Years Later, It's Still Hard To Believe That "Batman And Robin" Exists
What can you say that hasn't already been said about "Batman And Robin?" It is quite possibly the biggest Hollywood misfire of all time. It's a movie that, at points, feels intentional with its awfulness. It seemingly goes out of its way to take everything that anyone has ever loved about Batman or his rogue's gallery of villains and takes a steaming dump on it. It is easily in the five worst movies I've ever seen, and yet it falls into that rare category of film that is so spectacular in its awfulness that I nearly recommend it.
Don't get me wrong, if I was the age I am today in 1997, and podcasts were around, I probably would've ripped "Batman And Robin" so harshly to a point where Jeff Lowe and KenJac would've kicked me off the podcast. But watching it with a different set of eyes 25 years later, I'm just amazed by how "over" everything is. It's overwritten, overacted, overproduced, and over directed. It's a neon-infused glow stick of a movie laced with insufferable puns and lousy storytelling. It's a movie so bad that the film's director (the late Joel Schumacher, who made some excellent films) went out of his way to apologize, as has George Clooney on multiple occasions. The only person who never apologized for it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, while promoting this movie, referred to the script as the most amazing, spectacular script he ever read. Never change, Arnold, never change.
"Batman And Robin" is such a terrible movie that makes its mediocre predecessor look like "The Dark Knight" by comparison. "Batman Forever" is not a great movie, but it's stable. It's not the worst thing in the world. But as unspectacular as it may have been, it's still shocking just how horrifyingly awful its sequel was. We live in a world of multi-verses, reboots, and sequels. Once "The Batman" officially drops on Friday, we will live in a world where three different actors are currently portraying the caped crusader. Robert Pattinson is a part of the Matt Reeves universe. Ben Affleck remains part of the DCEU, as does Michael Keaton, who will be reprising his role as part of some multi-verse involving "The Flash" (I'm still a little bit confused by all of it, to be honest). It is so rare that a movie can be so genuinely terrible that it ruins the character's legacy for almost a decade in Hollywood. "Batman And Robin" was released in 1997, and it tanked so hard that we went eight years without a solo Batman film. Since the late 80s, a Batman movie has been in production or pre-production essentially every year, except for this one little blip in which nobody wanted to touch The Dark Knight as a character on film.
"Batman And Robin" is the 2003 Detroit Tigers of movies. In 2003, the Detroit Tigers bottomed out. They were essentially the worst baseball team of all time. They did not lose more games than the expansion Mets did, but they were a dumpster fire inside of a dumpster fire. That season shook owner Mike Ilitch, forcing him to start caring about baseball again. Three years later, the Tigers were playing in the World Series. The 2003 season needed to happen for a very fun (if not ultimately disappointing) era of tigers baseball to happen. "Batman And Robin" is one of the single worst movies ever made, but if it doesn't happen, we probably don't get Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, and I don't know what kind of film lover I would be if I existed in a world where those movies didn't.
"Batman And Robin" is the kind of movie that you watch with your friends when you're about 3-5 beers in so you can laugh at it and point out every single one of its flaws. Now that we're two and a half decades removed from its release, there's something admirable about just how awful it truly is. I'm not sure what I'm going to think of Matt Reeves' "The Batman." I'm excited about it. I hope it's excellent, but I can guarantee you even during its worst moment, it won't top the true awfulness of "Batman and Robin."
