Probably the best Batman and Robin review/recap ever.

[DropkickDisco]

http://www.agonybooth.com/recaps/Bat...obin_1997.aspx

Some gems:

Barbara's helmet then falls off, probably so we can fully appreciate her reaction when Dick takes a moment to remove his own helmet and say, "So, this is where you hang out!" Barbara, who's only being saved from horrible bloody death by the strength of Dick's ankle, just lets off an annoyed groan. Yeah, if I'm about to plunge 600 stories, about the last thing I'd want to hear in my final moments is a stupid pun.

Back at Wayne Manor, Dick quizzes Barbara about her racing. She explains that she's been doing it ever since her parents died because it "made the pain go away." Yeah, right. If that were the case, you would have seen a lot of people taking up street racing immediately after this movie came out.

A guard tells Freeze that he has a visitor in the form of his "sister", and Freeze is confused by this. The door opens, and it turns out to be Poison Ivy, all decked out in Robin Hood-wannabe green tights with her hair fashioned into a pair of bright red cones. And no one at Arkham considers this outfit unusual? "Brother, dear," Ivy says in her un-seductive voice, "I heard you were blue." Hah hah. I'd like my cyanide pills now.

Gordon tells them all about the people Ivy's killed, including a very late bit of exposition about a businessman she poisoned (offscreen) for the purpose of stealing his limo. Batman wonders why Freeze and Ivy would team up. "Well," Robin offers, "She's definitely evil!" That about sums it up, then. Thanks, Dick.

Batman goes to a computer and pushes buttons at random, which of course causes scrolling screens of blinking text and graphics to flash past his eyes. Apparently, these are Freeze's "experiment results" on MacGregor's Syndrome, and the words "Cure Found" are blinking on the screen, I guess to remind Freeze that he found a cure.

Batman says that Freeze has used his "freezing technology" to cure an early stage of MacGregor's, which I guess would be the "lip quivering" stage of the disease. (Oops! Hope I didn't give anything away!) Meanwhile, down below, Freeze and Ivy split up: She'll get his "snowy bride" while he gets his diamonds, then they'll meet up at Ivy's Turkish bath hideout afterwards.

Up above, Batman and Robin are talking as pink and purple Lik-M-Aid comes flowing out of an air vent. At first, they don't see it, and only smell it, but then they both turn and see it flowing out of the air vent. So, can they see the dust, or not? This is never made clear. Either way, they lift the cover on the vent and head down.

Meanwhile, Freeze somehow appears in the main room of his hideout and sees police swarming the place. The very, very astute cops, however, don't spot him. Freeze goes to a lever marked "Freeze" on one side, and "Heat" on the other, and pulls it to "Freeze". This causes white gas to steam out of every open vent, and we know this is Something Bad because we hear cops yell, "My lungs! My lungs are freezing!" Yes, that's right: Cops are yelling that their lungs are freezing. The feasibility of this will be left as an exercise to the reader. They all start falling to the ground as Freeze loads rocks of crack cocaine, I mean diamonds into his suit and gets high, or in his words, "Chilled to perfection!"

Now we get what's easily the most contrived dialogue in the whole movie, and that's saying a lot. Batman and Robin climb down through the vent in Freeze's secret chamber, and when there's no sign of Poison Ivy, Batman says, "No beauty." Then, Bane suddenly appears with a roar, and Robin adds, "Just the beast!" Hey, it's a good thing Batman just happened to refer to Ivy as a "beauty", isn't it? Otherwise, Robin would have never gotten the opportunity to turn it into a great pun on Beauty and the Beast.

But if you really want to see a "tale as old as time", look no further than this movie.

Robin takes on Bane and quickly gets tossed down some stairs, so Batman steps up to take a shot. Suddenly, Ivy appears beside Robin, calling him a "pretty birdie". She blows some more dust on him to render him helpless and asks, "Polly want a kiss?" Suddenly, after these bird puns, I'm liking the plant and ice puns a lot more.

Bane vs. Batman ends with Batman getting tossed over a railing and landing on the ground next to Robin. This snaps Robin out of his trance, and he pulls away before Ivy can kiss him. Robin staggers off to go fight Bane, apparently so that Ivy and Batman can have some "alone time". She climbs over to him and utters this immortal line:
Poison Ivy: There's something about an anatomically correct rubber suit that puts fire in a girl's lips!

Isn't there, though? She blows some more dust on him, and Batman, who by the way is supposed to be an experienced crimefighter here, doesn't try to hold his breath or move away from the dust. However, he does pull away before she can kiss him. Meanwhile, Bane is squeezing the life out of Robin (Whatever life there was in him in the first place), and he eventually knocks him out.

Back down on the ground, Ivy tells Batman, "I'm a lover, not a fighter!" (Which keenly predicts the "Girl Is Mine"-level dispute that Batman and Robin will be having shortly.) Then she points to Bane with her foot [?] and says, "That's why every Poison Ivy action figure comes complete with him!" I'm surprised she doesn't also add, "Get one free with every Burger King Big Kids Meal!" Ivy bids Batman farewell while Bane comes over to put the hurt on him.

Up in Freeze's hideout, Commissioner Gordon has located the Freeze/Heat switch and flipped it back to "Heat". Which begs the question: Why would Mr. Freeze have a "Heat" setting in his own hideout? Yes, it does appear that this place used to be an ice cream factory. But why would they have a "Heat" setting? (But then again, I guess this would come in handy if they ever needed to liquidate their inventory. Hah!)

Anyway, now that the "Heat" is on, everything starts glowing red [?], and all the cops instantly revive from getting their lungs frozen to go after Freeze. He's about to grab his Ice Cannon when suddenly cops come swarming, and he of course wastes some time shoving them around. And, strangely enough, not one shot is fired here, either. There must be a citywide ban on being mean to supercriminals.

[DropkickDisco]

I nearly died from laughing:

"But vengeance isn't power," Batman lectures. "Anyone can take a life. But to give life, that's true power!" And knowing is half the battle! Batman pleads to Freeze's inner scientist, calling him "Victor" and asking for the cure to MacGregor's Syndrome Stage 1. Batman fronts like he's just looking to save the lives of random MacGregor's sufferers, but we know he's just trying to hook up his boy Alfred.

In response, Freeze opens up a compartment in the arm of his suit and pulls out two blue, glowing test tubes. So, the Day-Glo Skulls in Ivy's hideout were drinking the cure for MacGregor's? "Tek two uff dese," Freeze says, "An cawl meh inneh mohning!" Batman takes the serum and promises to have Nora Fries moved to Arkham so Freeze can continue his "research" there. Geez, first we let prisoners have HBO, now this?

...

In closing, I'd just like to point out that less than a year after audiences heard Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy voice, the FDA approved Viagra to treat male impotence. Coincidence?

Of course, since he's now taken off those rubber lips, Ivy could just grab him and kiss him again and pretty much be done with him, but instead she shoves him into the pond. Robin, for some reason, can't escape from this four-foot deep kiddie pool of water as Ivy makes her escape.

...

We cut to Barbara at Alfred's bedside, apologizing to him because she was "too late", whatever that means. In response, Alfred makes a truly comical "suffering from Movie Illness" face like he just read the rest of the script.

...

Barbara plops the CD into the drive of an iBook and gets prompted for a password. The first one she tries is "Alfred". (Yes, you laugh now, but the real password will turn out to be even dumber.) Of course, we only know this because we can plainly see the password as she types it. Wow, why don't more password boxes work this way?

...

Bruce turns away and has another pointless flashback, because the adjacent room is apparently where Alfred once read Little Bruce a bedtime story. Not only is this a completely unremarkable memory, but it's also starting to appear that Bruce has no good memories of Alfred past the age of seven. I guess after this point, Alfred turned into a violent raging coke fiend or something.

Anyway, she sees the signature, and it finally comes to her: "Peg!" She types that in, and yep, it's the correct password. That's right, Alfred's CD, which holds sensitive information about Batman and Robin, including their secret identities and the location of the Batcave, all of that was protected by a three-letter word that can be found in any dictionary. Suddenly, Bruce seems a lot more sensible for not really trusting people.

[batfan08]

I loved the bit in the character bios about Poison Ivy.

Real name: Pamela Isley. A Greenpeace reject who gets infused with plant toxins that compel her to constantly toss out smutty one-liners. (Imagine Mae West reincarnated as a carrot.)

[SalmonKing]

I liked this article. I knew "Batman & Robin" was bad, and I didn't like it when I saw it, but this just reminded me just how bad it was, and even showed me that it was much worse than I thought. Being about 11 when I saw it last, I can't say I knew much about good and bad movies.

I'm thankful we once again have good Batman movies being made.

[batmanboy11]

This is one of the best reviews on Batman & Robin. Recently in english class when we were doing reviews the example in the textbook was a review of Batman and Robin. It certainly wasn't as funny as this but the reviewer did go to town on the movie so it still was pretty funny. Man that movie is terrible.