After Nearly 20 Years I FINALLY Saw Batman & Robin…

After nearly 20 years of avoiding the Batman and Robin movie, I finally watched it and I loved it!  Ok I know half of you who were going to read this article just clicked the back button on your browser.  The rest of you, bear with me and save your hate comments and death threats until after you read this.

First, I loved the first Michael Keaton Batman movie.  The second one wasn’t bad but I’d say I liked and not loved that one.  I really didn’t think much of Batman Forever at all.  So by the time this new Batman came out, I really wasn’t looking forward to it.  Once I started hearing how terrible the movie was, I avoided it entirely.  Which is impressive I think as “Gigli” is another movie that is almost universally hated and I willingly watched that a couple of years after it came out just to see how terrible that was.  But back to Batman and Robin…

As the movie came out in 1997 and has had terrible reviews, I’ve always assumed it was going to be terrible.  So going into this movie I knew I was going to see a terrible movie.  It was great!  I loved it.  It was just so bad that it was good.  It was campy.  Bane was probably the worst.  I can’t believe a comic book movie screwed up a character in a movie, that totally never happens.  It was cool to see John Glover as a cooky guy.  I usually see him as the 1%er in a suit looking all snazzy like when he was Lionel Luther on Smallville.  The mad scientist role was great.

Other wonderful bad things:

• Suits with nipples –except for Batgirl, I guess that would have made the movie pornographic
• Batman has a Batman credit card and never leaves the cave without it.
• All of the Mr. Freeze jokes.  They were dumb and fun.  I hope none of the people that complain about the lack of comedy in modern DC movies are also people that complain about the cheese in this movie.
• Poison Ivy dancing in a gorilla costume.
• The charity auction–men are throwing single bids on different women one after another instead of waiting for the auction on the previous women to end.  I guess if eBay can have millions of auctions going simultaneously, a charity auction can auction multiple women at once.

Some other high points:

• At one point Batman asks Mr. Freeze for the cure to some rare disease and of course Mr. Freeze just happens to carry around the cure with him.  I laugh and ask, “Take two and don’t call me in the morning?”  Nope, he says, “Take two and call me in the morning.”  So then I complain to the T.V. that he said my lines wrong.
• Jesse “the Body” Ventura has a small role in the movie and it was great seeing the two Governors sharing screen time again (They were also in Running Man and Predator back in 1987).
• Towards the end of the movie Mr. Freeze begins with “Winter…” and I’m thinking to myself, there’s no way he’s about to say “Winter is coming” 14 years before the TV series.  I’d have heard about it by now.  No, he says “Winter…has come at last.”  Aww Arnold, so close!

I saw a video where George Clooney mentions apologizing to Adam West.  There’s other interviews where he says he felt like he killed the Batman franchise after making that movie and was glad/relieved when Christopher Nolan rebooted the Dark Knight trilogy.

So for all of you who saw the movie years ago, expecting a serious and quality movie and were crushed, I gotta thank you.  If it wasn’t for your upset, I might have seen it early too and hated it.  After seeing and loving movies like Sharknado, I am able to watch Batman and Robin in a different way.

George, if you are reading this, you shouldn’t apologize for making a terrible Batman movie.  You brought back that 1960s camp that a lot of us still enjoy.

After watching a lovely movie filled with Batman puns, I would be doing you an Injustice if I didn’t refer you to the Batman Collection @ Nerd Imports.