10 More Films Hollywood Needs To Apologize For
If Joel Schumacher can apologize for Batman & Robin, anything's possible.
When Variety caught up with Joel Schumacher at the Hamptons Film Festival, the filmmaker was surprisingly candid about Batman & Robin. It’s not every director who celebrates a picture’s 20th anniversary by admitting that it was a sequel too far.
“I never did a sequel to any of my movies and sequels are only made for one reason: to make more money and sell more toys,” Schumacher said. “I did my job. But I never got my ass in the seat right.”
Released to theaters exactly two years after Batman Forever (with George Clooney as an eleventh hour replacement for Val Kilmer), Batman & Robin was described by The Austin Chronicle as “a limp, excruciatingly shallow knock off that leaves viewers cringing at the one-liners that make up the better part of the script.” Schumacher accepts the majority of the blame for the movie.
“I could have said, ‘I’m not going to do it’,” he says. “I just hope whenever I see a list of the worst movies ever made, we’re not on it. I didn’t do a good job. George did. Chris did. Uma is brilliant in it. Arnold is Arnold.”
Schumacher’s candour is refreshing, especially in the summer of Baywatch and Transformers: The Last Knight. Should his honesty inspire his colleagues to follow his example, there are several films for which an apology is long overdue.
10. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
After staging action sequences for XXX, Daredevil and Casino Royale, second unit director Alexander Witt made his helming debut with this sequel to 2002’s Resident Evil, and you can see why he never returned for the sequel
Apocalypse is slickly shot, well-staged and loaded with slam-bang set pieces, but Paul WS Anderson’s script is strictly on the level of a Saturday morning cartoon, with “cool” characters who spin their guns before holstering them or jump from a helicopter firing two weapons simultaneously if they’re really slick.
In other words, the kind of over-the-top shenanigans Robert Rodriguez serves up with his tongue firmly in his cheek are presented here without irony. When characters start wandering off alone, sneaking up on armed-to-the-teeth colleagues and hiding from zombies in a graveyard you have to wonder if the filmmakers set out to make a spoof of the first film with all the humour taken out.