Rating: 
Less than a minute into Batman & Robin , the fourth installment in the mighty Warner Bros. franchise, director Joel Schumacher is nudging the camera in tight closeups to Gotham City's crimebusting heroes: a Bat-butt-shot here, a Robin-crotch-shot there. Considerably later in this loud, long and pointless spectacle, Uma Thurman - decked out in chlorophyll green as vine-y vixen Poison Ivy - comments approvingly on the Cowled Crusader's ``anatomically correct'' Batsuit.
Yes, the nipples on the breastplate are back.
In addition to the kinky rubber worn by Batman , Robin and Alicia Silverstone's Batgirl, Schumacher resurrects the gang-rapist Droogs of A Clockwork Orange (in a cameo that also includes guys in West Side Story greaser gear) and takes us to a couple of nightspots that could easily pass as biker bars and gay discos.
If Batman & Robin is about anything, it seems to be about fetishism. By far the campiest of the four Batman movies (it gives the '60s TV series a run for its money when it comes to jokey excess and dumb double entendres), the movie is also the least entertaining.
Problems? Well, first there's George Clooney, replacing Batman Forever's Val Kilmer as billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. the Bat guy. Square-jawed and furry-browed, Clooney looks the part, but he also looks lost - uncertain whether to play this stuff straight or for laughs. And there's something wrong with his voice, too: a kind of flat, reedy delivery that's in marked contrast to the rippling musculature of his costume. As a TV doctor chasing gurneys and girls on ER, Clooney has a certain amount of presence. As Batman /Bruce Wayne, he's dwarfed by the mega-budget special effects kabooming all around him.
After watching Clooney and Kilmer, you begin to appreciate how effective Michael Keaton was in the first two Bat-pics: He was actually doing something. He was broodingly funny. There was a character there - not just an actor in a silly suit.
And speaking of silly suits, there's Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, Batman & Robin 's subzero baddie. Wearing chrome-plated, cumbersome armor (it's designed to keep him refrigerated at a frosty 50 below) and silvery-blue body paint, Schwarzenegger can hardly walk across a room. He looks like Robocop just escaped from a meat locker. And when it comes to delivering his lines - well, his first line (as he's deep-freezing Gotham City's Museum of Art) is a terribly droll ``The iceman cometh! '' It's downhill from there. (Schwarzenegger gets his own drama coach in the credits, and there's a dialect coach, too, but the star's line-readings, amid a cacophony of overstaged fight scenes, become increasingly incomprehensible. )
Schumacher and his production designer have cartoonized the Gotham City of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman : It now looks more like Disneyland (a Disneyland taken over by Russian Constructivists) than the dark, dramatically decadent place it once was.
Playing Poison Ivy - a misguided horticulturalist who has an accident that transforms her into an evil babe with flaming orange hair, two-tone fingernails and a literally lethal kiss - Thurman gets off a few amusing quips. She seems to have modeled her performance on the husky-voiced sex bombs of Old Hollywood: She's Mae West with moss.
Decorating a few scenes are Elle MacPherson (as Bruce Wayne's commitment-hungry girlfriend), Viveca A. Fox (her character's oh-so-clever moniker: Ms. B. Haven) and supermodel Vendela, assigned the thankless, and mostly motionless, role of Freeze's very sick wife. She has something called ``McGregor's Syndrome'' - also the ailment, it turns out, that Bruce Wayne's lovable manservant, Alfred (Michael Gough), is suffering from. In Batman & Robin , it looks as if good old Alfred might kick.
What else is going on? Robin 's in a funk because Batman 's always stealing the limelight, and the spotlight - as in the Batsignal. The Boy Wonder wonders why he can't get a Robin -signal to light up the night sky. And there's some icky stuff near the end with Batman , Robin and Batgirl (Silverstone, playing a niece of Alfred's, has hied over from ``Oxbridge University'' and discovers the Batcave), talking about teamwork and family values.
You know: The family that fightsexorbitantly-paid-Hollywood-actors-dressed-as-ridiculous-bad-guys together stays together.
