5. Batman & Robin (1997)
The Movie: There are no words for how reviled Joel Schumacher's bafflingly awful
Batman & Robin is by modern audiences. I like Joel Schumacher, and I think the man has made some good movies over the span of his career, but for this he should have been given forty lashes in public square. We don't have those? All right, a firm kick in the privates in front of all his family and friends, then. This movie has a plot, I think, but I'm not going to waste either of our time trying to write it out here. In its most basic terms, though, Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to cover Gotham City in ice. Wait: that's not in its most basic terms, that's at its most complex. Ultimately
Batman & Robin was just a toy commercial pretending to be a movie, and everybody involved with it deserves to be given forty lashes in public square. I know, I know: that doesn't exist as a form of punishment, we've covered that, but I'm just so darn angry. And I'm
obsessed with lashes at the moment.
Overlooked Positive: It put a stop to the Batman movies. With each added chapter that the '90s seemed so intently dedicated to giving us, the Batman legacy was slowly being torn apart, until - wham! - nobody really thought Batman was awesome anymore. Think on that: this movie was so terrible that the story of a man who flies around like a bat beating up criminals was un-awesomed. And yet the headache-inducing badness that we all associate with
Batman & Robin killed the franchise dead for almost a decade, until... well, you know the rest of the story. But without this campy showcase having ever existed, we might never have been granted the Batman movies we all love so much right now and forever more. So, uh, thanks Joel Schumacher, I guess? Sorry for all that talk about the lashes.