Batman too pooped to POW!

No style, substance in latest instalment

The Caped Crusader is tired.

Evidence of this ennui is all over Batman & Robin, fourth film instalment for the overworked and brooding crime fighter. Batman & Robin has neither style nor substance. What this movie has to offer is excess, and plenty of it.

This time, George Clooney dons the Bat mask and takes on such bad guys as Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze and Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy.

The plot, such as it is, involves Mr. Freeze's frenzied search for a medical cure for his wife's illness, along with his own need for diamonds. Poison Ivy just wants to annihilate humans and let plants take over the world. These two villains join forces in a plan to obliterate Gotham City, and having seen the architecture, we wouldn't argue.

Screenwriter Akiva Goldsmith's slim story ideas are buried in an avalanche of effects and technical wizardry and, no doubt just to be on the safe side, generous lashings of new-age psychobabble about loss, trust and family, too.

On the action side, Batman & Robin is an explosive series of fights, brawls, dust-ups, fisticuffs and donnybrooks.

Nothing happens without massive noise and destruction. The sets are huge and elaborate and initially fascinating. But the whole undertaking is so stagey and theatrical and hollow that it's hard not to start thinking about an Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical. This is a bad sign.

The first five minutes of Batman & Robin consist of an enormous and beautifully choreographed confrontation in the Gotham City museum, with everyone on ice skates dodging Mr. Freeze's awesome weapons and with exaggerated artifacts all around. It's an amazing opening and breathtaking to watch, but the scene proves to be one of many such creations, and the whole big-bang theory wears thin fast.

Otherwise, director Joel Schumacher offers a dying loyal family retainer in Alfred (the long-suffering Michael Gough), endless bickering between the Bat and Robin (Chris O'Donnell), issues of commitment for Batman's fiancee (Elle Macpherson) and the surprise arrival of a perky family member who turns herself into Batgirl (Alicia Silverstone).

Except for Uma Thurman, the actors are oddly bland, but maybe they were directed to follow the script.

At any rate, we are meant to believe that Batman's current personal crisis is all about family. One conversation has him agreeing that his life and work are all about control, even "an attempt to control death itself."

That would be correct, as in all myths and legends and fairy tales and comic books, but one expects Batman to act, not stop and talk about it. If we'd wanted Hamlet, we would have gone to Stratford.

Meanwhile, Batman & Robin does indeed have a collection of superb effects and visual delights -- just the thing for fans of the very production antics that regularly suck back your $8.50 at the box office.

Never mind. Batman & Robin is for kids who will relish the effects and who won't notice how lame the picture is.

And it's for anyone else who believes 'more is more'.