Review Detail

To echo Zarius' comments below, this cut is a valiant effort to make B&R into something watchable, however the excision of Alfred's health decline and some of the primitiveness of the editing techniques hinder the film, making the proceedings into something that doesn't even have the character depth of an episode of the Adam West Batman show (to which B&R is clearly attempting to pay homage).

But having pruned (because... Poison Ivy) the film's twenty-or-so plotlines gives the viewer a little bit better chance to focus on the best performance of the film, which is surprisingly... Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze. Spared of the rapid-fire puns, his character actually has a fairly convincing arc and his mix of kabuki camp and grounded emotions wouldn't have been out of place in one of the earlier Burton-directed entries. (The same cannot be said of Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy, who is a Schumacher creation thru-and-thru. And the less said about Bat-Alicia, the better.)

A serviceable digest version of an overblown disaster, but there's a better edit of this film out there somewhere, waiting to be seen.