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Batman and Robin

Arnold Schwarzenegger would become the governor of California a few years later. Alicia Silverstone and Chris O’Donnell would wind up fading away from movies. Uma Thurman would go on to kill Bill. And George Clooney would do something even more impossible: become the most famous movie star of his generation. How is it impossible to do such a thing? When you start out with movies like Batman and Robin, the road to success becomes so steep, it’s like walking up a wall. Clooney has been very public about how bad he thinks the movie is, and he’s absolutely right. Perform a painful trick: watch either Batman Begins or The Dark Knight, and then watch either Batman Forever or Batman and Robin. Try not to cringe for the entire two hours. I dare you.

So what goes wrong here? Well, unlike the 21st-century incarnation of Batman (and the animated version from the 1990s onward), this film is all about merchandise. There’s a credit card joke within the first five minutes, and…well, isn’t that enough? There is a CREDIT CARD JOKE in a Batman movie. When I think of how cheesy, how campy, how irretrievably silly these movies are, I genuinely wonder how the Adam West version of Batman ever became successful. Was being campy enough? One of the actual pleasures of the movie is listening to Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze. His one-liners are the stuff of bad-movie legend. I’ll leave you with my favorite from this horrendous near-franchise-killing sequel: “Let’s kick some ice!” Oh, and “The Ice Man cometh!” Oh, and “Tonight’s forecast: a freeze is coming!” Oh, and…

Speed 2: Cruise Control

Making a sequel to Speed seems logical. If Die Hard was an action movie contained to a skyscraper, and its sequels could survive by expanding the setting, why couldn’t the same work for a sequel to Speed, an action movie mostly contained to a speeding bus? The same should have worked, but it failed. The first problem was that Speed’s lead actor, Keanu Reeves, chose not to return. The second was that the film’s screenwriter, Graham Yost, had nothing to do with the sequel, set mostly on a cruise ship taken over by a madman. The third is that the villain wasn’t nearly as charming, charismatic, or frightening as Dennis Hopper was. Willem Dafoe, as the hijacker, isn’t a bad actor, but when you’re saddled with playing a guy whose creepiness is defined by the medical malady that requires he put leeches on his body regularly, the challenge is a bit too great.

Sandra Bullock returned here, and did her able best (and even though I’ve admitted I’m not a fan, I do mean that genuinely). Instead of Reeves, Jason Patric took the role of the stoic lead, another cop who Bullock’s character falls in love with. The attempts at humor fall flat, the action sequences are mostly bland and unexciting, and the stakes are lower. Why? Partly, the stakes are lower because the setting is so much wider. When you are on a ticking time bomb that’s a relatively claustrophobic setting with only a few other people, things can get tense. When the ticking time bomb is a behemoth of a cruise ship, the same can’t be said. Die Hard proved that the action movie could be reinvented, and by keeping its star, the series became iconic. Speed was clearly lightning in a bottle, and the people behind the sequel couldn’t capture it twice.

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