The Batman - Review
The Batman marks the 8th (9th?) film about the worlds greatest detective, and detect he does as the rain soaked, shadow draped Gotham is filled with your standard creeps, gangs, big time criminals, and of course supervillains. Up to bat (hah) this go around is everyones favorite resident weirdo white boy Paul Dano dialing it up as the Riddler, who begins to wreak havoc on the city and its citizens. The movie smartly eschews covering ground we’re all painfully familiar with by this point. That time is, instead, spent unspooling this world and its long list of characters, though perhaps not always to great success. It’s an interesting mix of the now-status-quo grim dark aesthetic we associate with the character, but also a willing embrace of the strangeness housed in its comic book sensibilities. This is Batman in his early days, and his quest for vengeance is feeling expectedly hopeless in a city this corrupt. He tells us as much in voiceover akin to that of Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, which allow us into the headspace of Bruce and informs us where we are in the story and of crucial context within it.
The plot, though at times can feel scantily structured, mostly follows Batman being pushed into increasingly complex situations due to the Riddlers trappings. Batman seemingly becoming the specific target of the Riddler. Pushing Bruce to see how far he’s willing to go, but also in an attempt to illustrate to him the futility of his efforts. That no matter what, there will be systemic failings and collateral damage. It’s a familiar well of dramatic and moral complexity for the character that can begin to feel as though it’s run dry. We have all become too overtly familiar with this character due to its constant pop cultural mainstay, and any major shake up in the formula feels hard to imagine.
There’s something to be said regarding the coda that closes this film and signifies this characters growth, namely because it’s the same exact one that closes 2008’s The Dark Knight. 15 years later and yet this film has little more to offer beneath it’s mask outside of needing to “become a symbol”, but it feels as though this character’s pitfalls are built in to its very identity. The same way Spiderman must chose between being a hero and having time for his personal life, it’s a built in, simplistic aim at imbuing human drama into their crime fighting endeavors and I can’t help but roll my eyes a bit at it here. I will give credit to Pattinson though, for bringing some life to this characterization. It does feel as though you have a better handle on Bruce and so the plot beats and character arcs land better. The Se7en/Zodiac comparisons however, are describing the set dressing, the aesthetic flourish contained in the film. But missing is the blistering, bleak miasma so exacting, cruel and acid dipped that is Fincher’s oeuvre. What they mean is that it rains a lot, and The Riddler sends letters with cryptographs on them.
The real reason to watch this, for my money, is the cast, who are stellar. Particularly happy about Jeffrey Wright as Gordon, who always delivers inspired performances. His grizzled under-breath intoned exhausted performance stood out, as did Colin Farrell’s manic, boisterous performance. Turturro works well as creepy and commanding, but his storyline exhausts, yet seems sadly needed as an attempt to humanize Catwoman (which it mostly fails at.) Let alone whatever that Russian roommate kidnapping subplot was. But on that front who cares, Kravitz certainly makes what she can of it and is inherently watchable as Selina Kyle.
It should be unsurprising that I have plot complaints, that the film is overstuffed with too many villains, that the third act falls apart a bit— it is a comic book movie after all. But this one has offerings of a great cast of actors, some interesting cinematography, effortful set-pieces, and well, it’s a Batman movie. You knew exactly what it was gonna be before you hit play, and maybe that’s part of the problem.
6/10