Yes, it's true. The first big action set piece to splash across the screen in this summer's installment of the Batman franchise is a choreographed hockey match. "It's the hockey team from hell!" Robin cries. In no time flat, he and the cowled crusader get knocked on their batbutts, exchange meaningful glances, and then click their heels together. On cue, their boots sprout blades and the duo confront the minions of Mr. Freeze, who has turned a natural history museum into a giant ice rink. "What killed the dinosaurs?" Freeze asks in his Schwarzenegger accent, grinning like a lunatic. "The ice age!" he answers himself, freezing a dinosaur replica with his big deep freeze gun and then kicking it over on top of our heroes.

Batman & Robin is nearly as campy as Austin Powers, which would be fine if only it were as funny. And nobody would be complaining about the goofy one-liners if the action scenes were solid armrest-grippers. But it's not, and they aren't. Despite it all, director Joel Schumacher comes out swinging, like a guy who's got something to prove. So instead of careful filmmaking, we get a whole slew of asides and flashy foofaraw designed to show us just how hip and cutting-edge this fogey of a director really is. From the Underworld tune on the soundtrack (oooh ... techno) to the aggressive cinematography (never before has a movie been this ... this ... purple), he's trying really hard to convince you that you've never seen anything like this before.

Well, we haven't seen George Clooney don the batmask before, and he certainly has the chin for the job. You'd think that a guy who dresses up in a bat suit and mixes it up with psychopaths every night might be a bit obsessive, but Clooney's Bruce Wayne is one impeccably cool cucumber. The ailing butler Alfred describes Batman's mission as "an attempt to control death itself," but Clooney just looks like he's trying to figure out whether his agent got him points on the net or on the gross of this thing.

Alicia Silverstone is simply miscast. When she arrives at the doorstep of the Wayne Manor and announces herself as Alfred's niece, she's merely adequate. When we find out that she sneaks away in the middle of the night to race motorcycles with a bunch of punks who look like those quaint "New York street thugs" from Rumble in the Bronx, she's even less convincing. That thing she does with her lips that was so adorable in Clueless? Apparently she just can't stop it -- she's in the same mode for the duration of this one, and it gets old. Chris O'Donnell does look at home as the Boy Wonder, though Robin's petulance wears out its welcome (we can blame that on the tired banter written into the script, which feels suspiciously like a first draft). As the toxic Poison Ivy, the botanist turned supervillain advocate of plants' rights, Uma Thurman makes an admirable stab at nailing her scattershot caricature of a villain, but -- for this viewer, anyway -- her sex appeal is squandered by some truly ugly costumes that are more likely to remind one of Studio 54 than of a malevolent earth mother. She's a significant presence, and I felt sorry for her.

Of course, the true measure of an effective performance in a film like this is how gamely the actor recites the stupid one-liners he's given and this movie's secret weapon is, believe it or not, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger's Freeze is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist (I know, I know) who suffered a crippling accident while researching a cure to save the life of his wife, whom he keeps in suspended animation so that she won't die from the fictional MacGregor's Syndrome. Now, he must keep his body at a frigid temperature at all times in order to survive. From his first appearance, it's apparent that Schwarzenegger has embraced every hoary cliche, every stupid pun and every comic book emotion, and then he plays them for the cheap seats, with glee. Nobody else looks nearly as happy to be up there on that screen. Schwarzenegger also has the movie's single best scene. After whittling a small figure of his wife out of a jag of ice, he constructs a clockwork music box and sets her to spinning, under glass, as he sits in his supercooled prison cell contemplating all the aspects of his now eternal aloneness. It's a moment that's startling in its poignancy -- a flash of clarity amid the clutter -- and suggests the real emotional drama that can be contained in even a "comic book" narrative.

Elsewhere, Batman & Robin commits the cardinal sin of a comic book movie. It's just boring, and could use some slimming down from its 126-minute length (at a lean 98 minutes, the upcoming Men in Black is barely more substantial or sensible -- but it's a hell of a lot more fun). If I were king, I would have either eliminated Batgirl entirely or had her suit up a lot closer to the beginning of the film, so she could do some good -- anything to get rid of that tedious motorcycle chase scene where Robin discovers how, um, tormented she really is. Bruce Wayne's girlfriend Julie (played by Elle Macpherson in an insultingly small role) would have hit the cutting room floor. And then there's the cheap shot of apparently killing off a beloved character only to bring him back to life at the end of the movie, the beneficiary of a supervillain's traveling pharmaceutical stash.

But don't let me give the impression that Batman & Robin is entirely charmless. I'm convinced that Schumacher is a hack, but he's an impetuous hack. There's a genuine whiff of subversion in the way he turns the Batman and Robin outfits into benippled fetish gear, filling up the screen with tight shots of the dynamic duo's black asses and codpieces (yes, Alicia gets her close-up later on). Later on, the sight of oiled bronze hunks on a jungle-themed dance floor, or of Batman and Robin getting all pissy with each other over a dancing queen like Poison Ivy (you get the sense that Ivy could be a transvestite in some parallel universe) helps reinforce the undercurrent of "homoeroticism" that purists like to sniff at. Hey, more power to him -- I consider it a joke at the entertainment conglomerate's considerable expense, and it makes me smile.