Batman & Robin changed my life. There was a time when I’d go to the movies frequently. I used to be one of the unthinking myrmidons in line at the multiplex, patiently awaiting the latest helping of celluloid gruel. I’d see anything: A Time to Kill? Saw it at the movies. Chain Reaction? Yup. Twister? Sure. That last one bears repeating—I paid money to see the film Twister in the theater. I was part of the problem. And then it happened—As I was skulking out of Batman & Robin with my cousin, the Truth was revealed to me. It was an epiphany I call the shlockatific vision: I finally realized that ever since I started regularly going to the movies, Hollywood had been defecating in my mouth and calling it a sundae. I understood that it was all tripe, and I understood that I was subsidizing it.

Over the years, I’ve toyed with the idea of renting Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin at my local Blockbuster just to try to tie down what it is exactly about this stink bomb that made it my personal watershed. Was it a singularly putrid individual scene or just the totality of the film’s rottenness? I’ve always wanted to know, but I could never justify paying more money to see this mess. And then I stumbled upon it in the library of a local college, and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to revisit the revelation.¹

Here’s what I learned:

• Vintage trailers are great — This has nothing to do with Batman & Robin, but trailers are one of the hidden joys of renting dated videos. Not only do they generate a swell of goofy nostalgia, but they are also an underrated source of unintentional comedy. If you’ve ever seen the trailer for Hudson Hawk recently you understand.

• This was written by the Robert Wuhl of the Screen Writers Guild—Akiva Goldsman, the author of this dudfest, actually penned A Beautiful Mind (a.k.a. The Mediocre Movie That Stole Best Picture from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring). But that’s not all — he also wrote or adopted A Time to Kill, The Client, Lost in Space, Batman Forever and Practical Magic. I’ve heard of a second chance, but this is ridiculous. The next time you hear somebody rhetorically ask, “I wonder why movies are so bad nowadays,” answer “Akiva Goldsman.”

• The movie gives you fair warning—This film has the most assaultively bad first minute I’ve ever seen. As soon as the opening credits finish, we are treated to a “suiting up” scene complete with close-ups of our leather-clad heroes’ codpieces and buttock that appear to have been inspired by an International Male catalogue.² Next, we get the first salvo in what is a barrage of half-baked zingers:

  Robin: “I want a car. Chicks dig the car.”
  Batman: “This is why Superman works alone.”

  Dear god, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg [Get it! “Iceberg”—Mr. Freeze is in this movie³. It gets much, much worse. For example, the scene in which Batman whips out a credit car emblazoned with the Bat symbol and quips, “Don’t leave the cave without it.” I’m sorry, I . . . I can’t go on.

• Joel Schumacher is GAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!—Just in case you weren’t able to figure out his sexual orientation during the film’s first thirty seconds, the movie’s aesthetic seems dedicated to making the viewer understand that the director is as obnoxiously gay as guys who like the “AND TWINS!” Coors commercials are straight. And it’s not just in the costumes, the color scheme, or the fetishistic shots of men’s genitalia, it’s also in the conspicuously computer-generated cityscape of Gotham City. While the dynamic duo are pursuing Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) from a diamond heist, we get a glimpse of a towering Grecian statute of a naked man whose presumably Winnebago-sized privates are obscured by some discreetly placed highway infrastructure. OK Joel, you like men, we get it.

• Don’t ever give up—After inflicting about 45 minutes of this upon myself, I was shell-shocked and close to giving up hope that I could ever pinpoint a transcendently bad moment amid this sea of stupidity. There was just simply too much awfulness to process—the bloated pathos of Alfred’s disease; Mr. Freeze bellowing “Kill the heroes!”; Chris O’Donnell’s embarrassingly over-the-top “acting;” Alicia Sliverstone’s grating tendency to nibble on her bottom lip; the Wagnerian, almost Nazified architecture of Gotham City; Arnold’s Pacinoian hamminess; the utter superfluousness of Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman); George Clooney’s too-cool-for-the-room smugness; the mere presence of Pat Hingle as Commissioner Gordon and, last but certainly not least, the undiluted, unremitting, unendurable cheekiness of the script. It was all coming at me to fast. And then, a moment of clarity—Mr. Freeze crashed the Flower Ball in some asinine vehicle, popped out its hatch, drew his freezer ray that turns people into blocks of ice and emoted the following: “All right, everyone, chill, chill, chill.” That was it. That is what put me over the top. Granted, it was probably Mr. Freeze’s seventeenth unfunny one-liner of the movie, but, for some reason, that’s the one that made me understand that I shouldn’t be going to movies like this anymore.

For Rene Descartes, Truth took the form of an Angel, for me, Truth came as Mr. Freeze. But I’m not complaining, there will always be miserable films to see at the theater, but thanks to this movie, I know I don’t have to go see them. I’ll just wait until they’re on HBO.

² If you’ve never seen this publication, look for it on Barnes & Noble’s magazine rack next to The Advocate or in the cluttered office of a local college’s Humanities professor.

³ This joke brought to you by Akiva Goldsman.