Yes, It Was THAT Bad...

As you may or may not know, I am a fan of comics & super-heroes. To give you some indication of my fanboy-ness, I was at the premier of the 1989 "Batman" movie, wearing:

1. A Batman hat
2. A Batman T-shirt
3. A hand-made, spray-painted, 8-inch wide wooden Bat Signal "necklace" (does it still qualify as a necklace if you use rope?)
4. A pair of acid-washed jeans that I had hand-drawn/colored all over (with Batman comics)
5. An acid-washed jean jacket that was also covered with hand-drawn/colored Batman drawings PLUS approximately 20 Batman buttons that I had been collecting from the local music store in the mall.

To top it all off, I was 15 at the time....not 7.

After that first Batman movie, they seemed to get progressively worse, in my opinion.

Batman Returns was still good, but getting cheesy (we're supposed to believe that a nerdy, awkward woman can fall out of a building onto the pavement, get licked by cats for a while, and suddenly knows gymnastics? It's insulting to the audience, to gymnasts, and quite frankly, to cats.)

Batman Forever began to be officially over-the-top, although I enjoyed it. Jim Carrey was good, but Tommy Lee Jones was a bad choice. He didn't even really need make-up to play Two-Face (I think the make-up was actually the GOOD side of his face...that guy's ugly).

And then there's Batman and Robin. I threw up in my popcorn bucket on that one. It was just bad. If Batman Forever was over-the-top, Batman and Robin pole-vaulted over the top, and cleared it by 97,043 miles. I bought the DVD, just to complete my collection, but I haven't watched it in years.

Until last night.

I decided to give it another try. Was it really as bad as I remembered? Has it gotten a bad reputation for no good reason? Had I been too tough on it after my first viewing? I tend to do that with movies. So I settled in with a bowl of generic-brand Cocoa Pebbles (which was packaged in a 15-pound sack, for some reason) and popped it in.

I was right the first time. Boy, was I right.

Within the first 15 minutes of the movie:

1. We see Batman and Robin's butts (not naked, but I can't imagine it being much worse).
2. The first line (if I'm not mistaken) is Robin saying, "I like the car...chicks dig the car." Not good.
3. Batman, Robin, and the generic thugs of Mr. Freeze play hockey with a diamond...and everyone had conveniently brought their hockey sticks for some reason...
4. Batman and Robin then activate the ice skates that they have cleverly installed in their boots, for such an occasion (although they didn't find out that the bad guy was named "Mr. Freeze" until they were in the car - which is another story - on the way to fight him). They anticipate having to ice-skate at some point in their crime-fighting duties??? I blame Tonya Harding.
5. After blowing up Mr. Freeze's skyrocket with a Bat-bomb, Batman and Robin SURF back down to the ground (from 30,000 feet or so), using the doors from the skyrocket. Wow. Honestly, this little gem of a scene made Catwoman's transformation look like a documentary.
6. Mr. Freeze makes approximately 82 puns, threats, comments, etc. and they ALL reference something to do with the cold: "I'm afraid my condition has left me cold to your pleas of mercy"..."Ice to see you"..."Allow me to break the ice. My name is Freeze. Learn it well, for it's the chilling sound of your doom"...I'm not making these up.

I finished watching the movie, but - for the life of me - I can't tell you why. It was like watching a reality show, just to see the mess.

Some things in life actually ARE as bad as we remember them. So why do we continue to go back to some of those things, over and over? Why do we revisit them, thinking/hoping that we were wrong? When a dish of food in my refrigerator goes bad, I throw it away (if I notice it); I don't leave it in there, thinking, "That'll be DELICIOUS next month!"

When it comes to bad habits, bad relationships, and - in general - sin, we should probably just trust our first experiences, leave those things behind, and move on. As God's Word says, we need to put those things to death, not preserve them for future enjoyment.

To wrap this up, the Batman movies DID get better, but only when they went in a COMPLETELY different direction (starting with Batman Begins).

If our lives are headed towards the spiritual equivalent of "Batman and Robin", we might want to rethink our direction.

Nobody wants to see that.

Well, almost nobody.