More than that, it’s a better idea than anything the comics or the DC Animated Universe have come up with to keep Freeze going. (To an extent, at least there’s one last gag with him promising to make Ivy’s life in Arkham a living hell as her cellmate. He provides the cure, gets facilities in Arkham Asylum to continue his research, and ends the film a reformed man. Freeze, having been manipulated and betrayed by Poison Ivy, agrees. Appealing to the doctor and the man, Batman asks Freeze for that cure. As it happens, Alfred is sick with the same condition as Nora, in a less advanced stage Fries had been able to cure. At the end of the film, Batman decides to try and reach the Fries within Freeze. It's in the way those two threads dovetail that Batman & Robin stumbles upon its own genuinely solid story element. With George Clooney stiff and uncomfortable in and out of the Batsuit, Chris O’Donnell and Alicia Silverstone saddled with some of the most unlikable incarnations of Robin and Batgirl around, and Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy a shallow vamp compared to the source material, Schwarzenegger’s Freeze is easily the most entertaining and likable figure on the screen. You don’t have the bad guy lead his henchmen in a singalong to the Snow Meiser song if he’s meant to have menace. To its credit, the film (usually) seems aware of this. On paper, Freeze’s actions and intentions toward Gotham put him further down the path to supervillainy than his animated counterpart, but between the sparkly suit and the wisecracks, it’s impossible to take this Freeze seriously as a threat. I have no idea what Schwarzenegger’s on-set experience on Batman & Robin was like, but it sure looks as if he had the time of his life tossing these groaners out. Every other word out of Freeze’s mouth is a cheesy pun or one-liner tied to ice or snow, and he attacks these lines with gusto. The costume is completely impractical for keeping his body submerged in frigid temperatures, but it adds extra bulk to his physique. And boy, does Batman & Robin lean into that personality.
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