Well, since we judged our favorite superhero movies at their best, it's only fair that we go for their worst. While these movies had some fandom and others would argue that others are worse than these, this is going by a stark popular opinion and these are the two that gave me the worst time in the theaters. Though, there are some close competitors for the worst movies of our duo, we'll just go with these for now and call it good. By all means, if you have a better comparison, leave it in the comments. Also Activate Spider Bat Spoiler Warnings! BATSPIDER SPOILERS!
The Amazing Spider-man 2
It was an enormous task to decide which of these to put in this spot. Between this and Spider-man 3, it really came to petty devices to choose. Needless to say, this one wasted the most time for the audience. Not only does half of the movie's plots go nowhere, but it also gave us one of the worst performances by Jamie Foxx, a very talented actor. There is just so much to go over for this movie, so let's get this over with.
The problems just start immediately as you are watching. The pointless plotline of his father and mother's fate and what they were doing went absolutely nowhere. We see him look into his father's research, his notes, his briefcase with the technology and then it all goes off a cliff. There was so much precious screentime devoted to this horrible waste of human breath and it was interesting to see where it could have gone. Then it was just a conversation between ghost dad and Peter at the end that was cut from the movie. You know what?? Nevermind!
Then you have that age old problem with the villains, which is a TRAVESTY in this film. Both villains are boring and both villains only serve to piss off the audience by wasting more time. We may as well start with Foxx, since we've already mentioned him. He's the lesser of the two evils, but he is still quite evil. Electro comes to life, then hates Spider-man because he takes away his audience for 2 seconds. He loves him, then immediately hates him because the cameras go on him. Great writing, guys, way to put in that second grader logic. The rest of his story is no better, and the effects they used for his face were positively abysmal! The final fight scene was so poorly done that it's really hard to remember anything other than when he beat him in the tone of "Itsy Bitsy Spider". His obsessive Spider-man delusions at the beginning were hard enough to sit through, and they just hand us nothing better throughout the film's runtime.
The Green Goblin was even more horribly handled, as hard as that seems to believe if you haven't seen for yourself. The guy they got to play Harry Osborn was absolutely horrific in his role throughout the entire film. He cannot act to save his life, though that also may just be the directing. Either way, his performance was boring, monotone and absolute cringeworthy material by the time he got on the speeder thingy. His costume as the Green Goblin would have probably made it to more memes if he didn't look so utterly special. The way he came to the realization of Spider-man being Peter just made hands meet foreheads across the globe with how terribly it was executed.
Then, of course, there's Gwen Stacy. Obviously, they handled their relationship fairly well. The breakup was unneeded drama, especially when it doesn't end up mattering in the end. Her obvious exit from the franchise was forecasted to an extent, but given their choice of Green Goblin, it just didn't work. Would we have liked her not to die? Yes, but if she had to, they could have at least gotten someone better for the villain role to do it. His reaction to her death was understandable, giving up the mask for a time. They handled his depression well and Garfield put on a great performance with her death scene.
Beyond that, the Rhino with Paul Giamatti was a stupid way to handle his role. If they were going to waste all of their time with him as a human, they should have swapped and just given all of the time with him as the Rhino. There are just so many plotlines that go nowhere, like Spider-man's blood maybe having the cure for Osborne's disease or the Sinister Six garbage they set up but alas, there was no sequel. It really just all amounted to the audience getting nothing they wanted.
It's also quite strange to note that they were planning to set up the Sinister Six, and yet they killed Electro in the end. He has been a key member in several iterations of the team and yet they kill him off before this series even gets a Sandman. The lizard was a good start, and Green Goblin plus Electro could have possibly gotten a good squad together, but they seemed to readily poke holes in their own plans. Just think of how they set up the Rhino. It's hard to believe anyone would get excited for such a team up, even with Giamatti returning to the role, which would be doubtful even if the series continued.
There were some good scenes in the movie. Some of the smaller scenes of Spider-man doing his thing were quite entertaining or when he was inventing new webshooters. The scenes between Peter and Gwen were very well handled when they were an actual couple. The fight and Gwen leaving to go overseas for college were just all filler upon filler to add more and more storylines that bog this movie down. Given what actually happens to Gwen, they spend entirely too much time with them fighting and worrying about each other and not enough time doing what was their strong suit: Being a couple. The two actors were dating at the time, so they knew how to bounce off of one another very readily. They even improvised lines very effectively.
The fact that some snearing, ugly jerk comes and kills her is probably one of the worst things about this film. The problem was that their version of the Green Goblin was gangreneous and every moment he was on screen was absolute torture. How he took one single look at Gwen and figured out that Spider-man was Peter will go under file as one of the worst most contrived plotpoints since Spider-man 3's Harry Osborne had the butler revelation of who actually killed his father. Such lazy storytelling takes the audience out of the experience and this is no different.
There came a time when the story just didn't know when it needed to ease off the throttle. When Green Goblin is starting to execute his plan, Electro is fighting Spider-man and Gwen is struggling to get the controls of a power plant, they decide to sprinkle a small plan crash plot like a garnish that ruins the food's texture. Why was this in the film? No, seriously, they had everything else going on, why did they need to add to the duration of an already over-stuffed movie? There is a rule: Every scene should do one, if not multiple things in a natural flow. This entire thing with the plane being unable to land does literally nothing.
Even the good things are bad in this movie. It is a slog to get through with all of the weight it is carrying with wasted time and plot devices. The performances are laughable and unable to carry this film, it just had too much footage cut from it when they thought they should keep in all of the content and maybe finish it later? Their decision didn't make any sense and we never got a third movie because Sony would have liked Andrew Garfield to attend big parties or something like that, it's all just a mess. Given how the first Amazing Spider-man started out, it would have been nice to see it go in a better direction. Is it worse than... another superhero dud, though?
Batman and Robin
There comes a time when studios and directors need to ask themselves how serious they are going to take a project. Sadly, Joel Schumacher has passed on since the making of this film and Planet Virtua bears him no ill will. We understand he was actually quite a lovely human being and he did direct Phone Booth, which was a very good movie. Batman and Robin, however, was not taken seriously in the slightest. Even with the dark versions of Batman being popular and the more serious elements of even the third movie, Schumacher was told to make it safe for kids. He took that to mean it should be a cartoon. He has since apologized through an audio commentary.
If you don't take this movie seriously, it can be fun to watch. Putting it next to Batman and Batman Returns, however, is another story. Hell, putting this up against Batman the Animated Series, which WAS a cartoon, still paints this in such a silly and clownish light. How they changed Bane from an actually intelligent criminal with venom powers just killed his character. Now he's just a Frankenstein's monster knockoff who has caveman talk. Everything is dumbed down like that. Even Uma Thurman didn't take this seriously and just had a lot of fun pumped into her performance.
George Clooney, however, seemed to be rather miserable throughout the entire shoot. It seemed like he was wanting a more serious version of Batman, not this one where he ice skates and plays hockey with a bunch of thugs like Adam West Batman days. That's how the entire duration continues to play. Even when this movie is trying to be serious, it just gets serious enough to get to the next joke of a movie scene. Both Clooney and Arnold would go on to say that the movie did not help their careers in the slightest and many criticized them for making Batman into a parody. They have apologized, but they have also garnered a bit of an ironic cult following at the same time.
That leads us to Arnold as Mr. Freeze. If there was ever a more memed villain, it's hard to think of one. His ice puns are infamous from this role, and he just clowned it up for the fun of it. He had no problem putting on the polar bear house slippers and having a good dance to the Snow Miser song. His costume did look very impressive and apparently cost millions of dollars to both operate and keep Arnold in. Every single second he was on screen, they were burning through cash for this film, as it turned out to be one of the most expensive movies of the time.
Nothing in this movie really makes a whole lot of sense at all. We don't see how Mr. Freeze's wife can breathe in her fish tank, we don't know how diamonds can power and charge machines meant to freeze things with ice lasers, and the forces that they are playing with in this movie could possibly destroy the Earth's atmosphere with ice lasers and sun heat beams from space. They just tossed logic out the window and said nonsense mumbo jumbo to make it sound good. They even made up a fictional sickness for both Mr. Freeze's wife and Alfred Pennyworth to be sick with just to tie their two plots together.
Every side plot in this movie basically all boils down to "Team Work" and goes about it with a scattered sensibility. Robin keeps getting snubbed during missions because Batman does not trust that he is able to handle the danger. Thankfully, he doesn't milk the fact that he is an orphan and sad about his parents, in fact, he simply mentions that while he was with the Flying Graysons, it only worked because they were a team. While the theme is readily available without thought, the line does show character depth. Then there is them accepting that maybe Alfred's niece is skilled enough to take down criminals in a bat costume. This was a great idea with very poor execution. Making them into the Bat Family was a great idea, but it needed time to breathe, rather than be shoehorned in at the third act. Not to mention, let me accentuate my point when I say that Alicia Silverstone cannot seem to get out of her school girl persona until she gets into her Batgirl outfit and suddenly she is a blank plank of wood. Alicia is trying to be a badass when she's in the costume, but it makes her sound like she's about to fall asleep. They take the theme of "Team Work" entirely too seriously and run with it a few bridges too far. It's also prudent to note that Poison Ivy betrays Mr. Freeze because she is jealous of his wife. Bad guys have no "Team Work" and yadda yadda.
There's another character that got very poor treatment, Batgirl. Oh yes, and Alicia Silverstone is absolutely horrible in the role. She has the look but she does not have the acting skills. She and Robin have a very terribly written dialogue of some sort of chemistry. It wasn't the good kind of chemistry but something was at least there. If the script were any better, it may have been passed off as a wacky comedy Batman, but as it stands, it will never be extended upon.
The relationship between Robin and Batgirl could have gone somewhere, but all it really did was pad out the runtime and give the late, great Coolio a brief cameo. Neither Silverstone nor Chris O'Donnell had the chemistry nor the script to pull this off effectively, so their flirting near the end was stilted and cringeworthy. In fact, even the scientists' acting was extremely amateur. When these elements are put together with a stupid giant laser plot, it really just falls off the rails. Yes, it was always a good plot for an Adam West Batman movie. With exploding sharks and other wondrous gimmicks like running around with a giant cartoon bomb, you can see where Schumacher got his inspiration.
The movie made money, but the reviews for it were so bad that Warner Brothers decided to pull the plug on the entire series. Many will argue that the Burton universe and the Schumacher universe were two separate things and you'll get no argument here. What it brought were the Nolan films and those were far better received, even though the third movie was... well that's a review for another time.
Which of these movies is worse? That's an excellent question. Should I give a point to the winner of the worst movie or the one that's not as bad? That's another very good question. So, we'll keep this rolling by going for a tie, giving them both a point, because no one truly wins in a conest of absolute horrific quality. Both of them have terrible movies, not to mention TV shows, but that's, once again, another article for another day. Rest in Peace, Joel Schumacher, Virtua Rest.
