"Batman & Robin" (PG) Savoy, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
An air of tired desperation permeates the debacle that is Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin, the fourth Caped Crusader movie in as many years - and by a very long way the weakest and most facile. It is the third of the four films to feature a different leading man, with George Clooney following Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer into the dual role of billionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne and resourceful crime fighter Batman.
Whereas Keaton barely registered in his two Batman outings for director Tim Burton, and Kilmer brought a vital spark of life to the character in Schumacher's Batman Returns, Clooney looks distinctly uncomfortable in his cape and cowl, which is hardly surprising given how he little he has to say and do. Clooney's wooden Bat man is so insignificant that the villain gets top billing in the new movie - Arnold Schwarzenegger, who reportedly received $25 million as payment for six weeks work on the film. He plays Mr Freeze, formerly Dr. Victor Fries, an Olympic decathlete and molecular biologist whose body mutated in a scientific accident, as he tried to preserve cryogenically his ailing wife. Now clad in a subzero suit that, er, requires diamonds to keep him chilled, Mr Freeze schemes to hold Gotham City to ransom with a threat of freezing it and its truly beleagured inhabitants.
Rarely has Arnold Schwarzenegger been quite so robotic in movement and line delivery, although the best actor in the world would be hard pressed to work up much enthusiasm about a screenplay in which his lines are almost all formed as feeble puns on the theme of freezing. Like "The iceman cometh!". Like "You're not sending me to the cooler". Like "Allow me to break the ice". Like "Let's kick some ice". You get the picture.
The author, of all, this scintillating repartee is Akiva Goldsman, who scripted the last three Schumacher pictures, Batman Forever and the John Grisham adaptations, The Client and A Time To Kill. Goldsman's perfunctorily plotted script for Batman & Robin entirely foresakes the depth and ambition Tim Burton brought to the DC Comics creation of Bob Kane when, back in 1989, Burton reclaimed the cartoon character for the screen and away from the campiness of the television series with which it had become so closely associated.
Under the leaden direction of Schumacher, that gloom laden nocturnal look is all that has survived into the new movie, and even that now serves only to add to the dreariness of the proceedings. Sure, there are some new gadgets such as the turbocharged Redbird motorcycle, of Robin (played, again by Chris O'Donnell in a tight crewcut and oversized cod piece). Against Bruce Wayne's advice he falls for the movie's second and rather more interesting villain - an environmentally concerned botanist turned into the vine entwined Poison Ivy, who gives a killer kiss and is played with some relish by Uma Thurman.
Meanwhile Bruce Wayne's elderly butler, Alfred (Michael Gough) moves awkwardly from the fringes towards centre screen as the movie threatens to kill him off, and Alfred's niece travels "all the way from the England", even though her accent sounds entirely American. Doffing her school uniform for a Bat girl costume, the niece (played by Alicia Silverstone from Clueless) gets involved in an inane set piece of a motorcycle racing challenge that is frenetically edited to the point of incomprehension.
And so it goes as the lifeless Batman & Robin drags its wearisome way to a totally predictable and creakily protracted finale. As the miles of closing credits begin to roll, the Smashing Pumpkins perform The End Is The Beginning Is The End, an apt choice of song title for a movie that surely signals the end of a series which has lost its way and now appears to have more to do with marketing merchandising tie-ins than with such outmoded notions as imagination, adventure and entertainment.
"Rumble In The Bronx" (18) Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
In refreshingly sharp contrast to the bloated Batman & Robin, the Hong Kong action movie superstar, Jackie Chan, gets back to basics - eschewing special effects and showing just what can be done with a brain, two legs and two hands - in the vigorous romp that is Rumble In The Bronx, one of Chan's rare sojourns into American cinema and just his fifth in a career that spans three decades.
Chan was aptly described by Time magazine last year: "In American terms, he's a little Clint Eastwood (actor director), a dash of Gene Kelly (imaginative choreographer), a bit of Jim Carrey (rubbery ham), and a lot of silent movie clowns: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd."
Now in his mid forties and remarkably well preserved, Chan shows he is as energetic as ever in this yarn which features him as a Hong Kong tourist in New York for a family wedding and a holiday, only to get caught up in the machinations of the Mafia and a ruthless motorcycle gang. He befriends a young boy who is confined to a wheelchair and sets about steering the boy's grown up gogo dancer sister away from her gangster boyfriend. Oh and the villains just happen to have hidden a cache of diamonds in the cushion of the boy's wheelchair.
In the threadbare narrative of Rumble In The Bronx, action is the raison d'etre and it hardly matters when the dialogue is risible, which is most of the time, and the dubbing is mistimed, which is even more often. And the compact Chan delivers the action with gusto - balletically somersaulting, jumping and high kicking his way through it all and employing armchairs, fridges and any other means of unlikely artillery by way of self defence.
In the movie's most remarkable stunt work, the agile acrobat that is Chan takes a near suicidal leap from the rooftop of a car park on to the balcony of an adjoining building 40 feet away and eight floors, up from ground level - with just an out of frame airbag to protect his fall should, the stunt go wrong. On first viewing, it seems incredible. Then, you see it again in the brisk montage of out takes at the end of the movie, and you realise it's for real.
Helen Meany adds:
"Jungle To Jungle" (PG), Savoy, Virgin, Omniplex, UCIs, Dublin
"There can never be too many movies about fathers being good fathers," Tim Allen declares in the publicity for Jungle 2 Jungle, but he's wrong. This yarn about a Wall Street commodities trader (Allen) who discovers that he has a 13 year old son called Mimi Siku (Sam Huntington), raised as a member of an Amazonian tribe (long story), pushes our patience with father son bonding routines beyond endurance.
As well as the family values homily, the director, Don Pasquin, seems keen to deliver a bland lesson in comparative anthropology, with echoes of The Jungle Book and Crocodile Dundee. So the predicament of the workaholic Michael, stranded in city suit and braces (without a modem) in the jungle where his wife has been living for 13 years, is contrasted with Mimi Siku's visit to New York, where he solemnly observes the strange customs of Michael's tribe.
The laboured humour is all derived from cultural difference, with Mimi Siku barbecuing ornamental fish, urinating on the potted plants, releasing his pet tarantula in Michael's office and preferring the cat's dinner to the tasteless "kids' food" he's offered.
Tim Allen reprises his hapless paternal role from Don Pasquin's last film, The Santa Clause, with some comic flourishes, but not enough to rescue this from absurdly corny predictability.
