Introducing Batgirl, the worst yet of the Caped Crusaders, a mush-mouthed motorcycle daredevil (Alicia Silverstone) over from Oxbridge University to visit her ailing Uncle Alfred, manservant to the heretofore Dynamic Duo. As if to make her feel at home, the movie overall has more and worse of just about everything. Bigger and worse production; louder and worse sound; brassier and worse color; busier and worse action; quicker and worse jokes. Even when it does not have more, but only different, it's still worse. There's a new Batman -- George (Mr. Wiggly) Clooney -- the third Batman in four movies, and the least comfortable of them in the persona of Bruce Wayne, Billionaire Philanthropist. And though there are no more than the by-now standardized number of villains -- two -- they, likewise, are the worst to date: Mr. Freeze, a blue-faced Arnold Schwarzenegger, armored in a plastic football uniform and armed with whatever would be the opposite of a flamethrower (a frost-thrower, possibly, or ice-thrower); and Poison Ivy, a vampish Uma Thurman, scattering aphrodisiac pixie-dust down her primrose path, planting literal kisses of death, speaking almost exclusively in sub-007 double-entendres, and, the worst of her crimes, stealing Marlene Dietrich's gorilla-suit striptease from Blonde Venus. Such is the level of social consciousness and personal conscience in the movie that the latter villain is made to be the mouthpiece of save-the-rainforest environmentalism (even at a cost of slaughter-the-populace), and the former is entrusted with the line, "I hate when people talk during the movie" (another viewpoint aligned with homicide). Chris O'Donnell, Michael Gough, Pat Hingle; directed by Joel Schumacher. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd