BATMAN & ROBIN (or BATMAN 7 ROBIN as my keyboard seems determined to call it) was clearly not your father's superhero movie, unless your father was a hack screenwriter with a homoerotic streak who thought shitty puns were the very heights of comic genius. The villains in this third sequel to Tim Burton's solid original (though watch it again if you haven't seen in a while; it is already aging poorly) are Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy. One might ask: what could these villains possibly have in common? One is obsessed with freezing everything, the other with covering the world with vegetation. The two goals are seemingly at odds. The leaves falling off the trees on my street suggest they would not be very good friends.

As Movie Poop Shoot's Scott Timpton very accurately pointed out in his indispensable Comics 101, Mr. Freeze was a originally a minor Batman villain originally called Mr. Zero (sporting one of the all-time great fashion emergency costumes), who shot things with a freeze gun and wore giant punchbowl on his head. He really came into his own as a villain on “Batman: The Animated Series,” where he was cast a tragic figure; poisoned by the frigid chemicals he used to put his dying wife into suspended animation, he commits crimes to fund his research in the hopes of reversing his condition as well as hers. BATMAN & ROBIN's Freeze is clearly drawn from the animated version, right down to the frozen wife and goal-driven criminality. He spends hours staring at his wife's lifeless body, or shedding icy tears over their wedding video. He is consumed by remorse that turns his heart as cold as his body.

Why, then, do you suppose he spends the rest of the movie cracking god-awful cold/ice/freeze jokes at Batman? How, exactly, do lines like "THE ICEMAN COMETH!" or "FREEZE IN HELL BATMAN!" accurately reflect Freeze's inner turmoil?

In one of the grossest mischaracterizations in the history of movies Mr. Freeze, a character devastated by loss, frolics around like a Catskill comedian! Schwarzenegger, who plays Freeze, has certainly relished bad puns in the past, but never on this scale or with such frequency. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who talked a lot of crap about this movie when he won an Oscar for A BEAUTIFUL MIND, might have been forced to write these jokes by an egomaniacal star, but he is still the only credited screenwriter. You think additional people refused credit for their writing here? I would have.

Mr. Freeze fits right in with the rest of BATMAN & ROBIN's plot, whose tone is equally unpredictable. One minute the Dynamic Duo are fighting thugs who spout Scooby Doo sound effects (i.e. Yoink! when one gets knocked over by a flying disc), the next poor old Alfred (Michael Gough) is dying of an incurable disease! Gough gives a genuinely touching performance that is utterly wasted, since all around him people are unironically shouting "COWABUNGA!" George Clooney, thanklessly forced to straight face the whole project, is a good Bruce Wayne but doesn't have much charisma beneath all that latex and rubber.

Director Joel Schumacher was going for something here, but damn if I can figure out what. In press at the time, he claimed BATMAN & ROBIN harkened back to the tone of the old 1960s television show, but campy as it was it, that show was actually clever -- it was funny because they were trying to be funny. BATMAN & ROBIN is only funny when the staggering, nonsensical, monumental unfunnyness of it all comes into full view (Like any time Schwarzenegger opens his mouth, for instance). And I can't help but notice that Schumacher’s version of Gotham City features a staggering number of giant statues of naked men. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I could go on and discuss everything else this movie gets wrong. Like how Freeze freezes everything and then Batman unfreezes it, but there never seems to be any water created. Or how Batman, Robin (whiny Chris O'Donnell), and Batgirl (a bland, charismaless Alicia Silverstone) are in a rush to stop Freeze's evil scheme, but have time to change into specially-designed costumes that have been sitting around for just such an occasion. Or the wire-work stunts that looked bad back in 1997 and looks even worse now. This movie is a cornucopia of comic crap.

Yet the immense and near-total bombness of the venture lends it a charm akin to watching Jon Stewart on “Crossfire” or Ashlee Simpson on “Saturday Night Live” - it's so purely awful on nearly every level in a way that few films are ever allowed to be. With so many gatekeepers, studio executives, test screenings, most of the eccentric material in the mainstream gets weeded out well-before we ever see it. BATMAN & ROBIN feels like its comprised solely of these eternally discarded parts.