George Clooney – Action Hero Movies

With constant screeching music throughout, and plot, script and action that can surely only have been made for ADHD kids, I could only bear to watch the first 15 minutes of this movie, which it quite shocking considering Batman is played by George Clooney and the main baddie, Mr Freeze, is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The producers here literally did the impossible and turned an outstanding recipe into a massive flop. It reminds me of Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever (2002) starring Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu and Talisa Soto — another great cast, within a great genre for action hero movie fans, that somehow became a massive flop. Due to cast and genre, both movies could be passively watched if desperate bored and in some kind of zombie trance ‘feed me anything’ mode, but they’re both so bad even someone who made a website for action hero movies (myself) can’t stand to watch them if I have anything remotely worth doing instead (work, study, exercise, eating, sleeping, or another movie for example).

Just to be certain, I skipped forward and watched a few seconds every few minutes, and the screeching music literally never let up — ever — and the plot script never became interesting.

For a while it reminded me of Dolph Lundgren’s flop, Masters Of The Universe (1987), but I’m actually settling on the view that this Batman And Robin movie is so bad it makes Masters Of The Universe look good! As such, I’m going to rate it markedly Unwatchable, on a par with Clooney’s more recent massive flop, The American (2010), which had a very different kind of mood but was terribly boring nevertheless.

You might think I’m hating on Clooney or Arnie but I’m really not — they’ve both got plenty of respectable movies to their names. But Batman And Robin (1997) isn’t one of them.

The American (2010) is the epitome of a slow movie. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a slower assassin themed movie – not even close.

When you think of all the silent bits of standing around, walking, driving, and basically doing nothing that a really good movie condenses out… If you stuck all that junk filler content together to create its own movie (adding just a few minutes of mildly good stuff) then you would end up with The American!

I skipped forward through about half of this movie. It’s seriously boring. But there are some mildly interesting scenes. There’s a serious lack of script, and a serious lack of words. Around 40 minutes in, I very nearly gave up on it entirely. I dare say this is an Unwatchable movie, but I did watch most of it, skipping past the worst of it from the middle onwards.

What more is there to say? George Clooney is getting old – he’s nearly 50 here. He poses a lot, without saying much. His performance isn’t bad, but the script is practically non existent. Why would he waste his time with garbage like this? Maybe there’s an audience for this kind of slow & near-silent movie, but it’s not for me. I think I may have tried to watch it once or twice before, but gave up after just a few minutes.

It takes me back to the days of having only 5 options on TV, when we regularly watched the ‘least worst’ option and may have been passingly amused for a few moments here & there but was generally bored stiff and would never willingly tune in to that kind of tripe in the days of abundant choice online.

Admittedly it does warm up a bit, in the back end of the movie, as it becomes clear there are people tracking him down, and he gets very close to a woman who he doesn’t trust after finding a gun in her handbag. The last half hour is kind of respectable, with several mildly entertaining scenes not terribly far apart – it’s still rather slow but not nearly so torturesome as the first hour was. It’s like a snailpace old James Bond movie with budget slashed and a depressing final moment. I feel like a mug for even watching it. Never again! The things I do, so you don’t have to…