Although enjoyable enough, The Batman is a well-intentioned yet ultimately misguided mess of interesting ideas that fail to come together to create the compelling mystery it claims to tell.
I’ll begin with a food metaphor (as I tend to do): imagine placing all your favourite toppings on a pizza but unfortunately the oven is broken, or you don’t know how to work it. Sure, you can pick the toppings off the dough and just enjoy them that way but then you wouldn’t be eating pizza.
That’s The Batman.
For two years the vigilante known as Batman has been fighting crime in Gotham City but is now faced with a serial killer leaving clues for him that point to corruption at the highest levels of Gotham as well as a link to Bruce’s past.
As a basic premise it has so much potential for this incarnation of the Dark Knight, in fact there are so many great and interesting ideas put forth in this new film. The problem is that very few of them coalesce to make a good story and the filmmakers seem unable (or perhaps unwilling) to follow through with some of the bigger ideas being presented. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy The Batman, I was surprised by that considering how ambivalent I was in the lead up.
My enjoyment comes from appreciating what this film was trying to do and the mere presence of all those interesting ideas and concepts but ultimately let down by their execution. It’s another one of those cases where if you described to me what happens in this film in dot point form that would be more compelling than the film itself (mostly).
MINOR SPOILERS from this point on…
In fact, you do get suckered into thinking this movie is better than it is because of the presence of those appealing elements: it was a delight to see “the world’s greatest detective” solve puzzles and notice little things most folks would miss (until you realise the mystery is kinda shit and Batman makes a peculiar mistake), I liked seeing Jim Gordon and Batman working together, and I’m fascinated by this shift away from the traditional portrayal of Alfred (it’s not new, however not all attempts work), just to name a few things.
The cast are a bit of a mixed bag. Let’s address the elephant in the room… I had ZERO issue when they announced the casting of Robert Pattinson as Batman. He’s a very handsome guy with a square jaw who can also act – so he fulfils all the basic requirements for putting on the cowl and he is indeed a decent enough young Batman. Unfortunately, his Bruce Wayne leaves a lot to be desired. In all fairness that’s not his fault, it’s just how Bruce is written: bereft of any personality.
Now you can make the tired old argument about “Batman is the true persona and Bruce Wayne is the mask” but that ignores that this version of Bruce is a personality vacuum. Like if there were any indication that he was learning to put on the “Bruce Wayne mask” then that would be something but that’s not what’s happening here. There’s a scene where Bruce expresses how important Alfred is to him but nothing in the movie builds up to this and the scene falls flat.
In a similar vein, Zoe Kravitz makes for a great Selina Kyle and someone worthy of Batman’s attention and affection but the elements that make her Catwoman seem somewhat downplayed and watered down (not completely but enough to question what was the point?). Jeffery Wright is one of my favourites and he too makes for a great Jim Gordon and as he’s still a detective he gets a lot to do, however, I started to get suspicious when I was continually being reminded how much of a “good cop” he was. And as I said earlier, I’m intrigued by the shift away from the traditional posh butler depictions of Alfred many of us have been used to for decades, and Andy Serkis certainly makes for a man more capable than just making tea but he too seemed underutilised in that manner.
It may be the writing, it may be the casting, or it may be both, but two of the villains/antagonists just didn’t work for me. It’s bad enough that the Penguin gets watered down into a bland yet glorified henchman absent anything that made the character interesting or iconic in the first place, but the stunt casting of Colin Farrell under all the prosthetics is rather bewildering and pointless. I’m not saying he’s not good, it’s just that you could find any talented actor with a double chin and a receding hairline and save on the make up budget.
On paper, reimagining The Riddler as a themed serial killer is an interesting idea. But despite Paul Dano’s best efforts, what ends up on screen is neither scary nor compelling. His design is derivative and you realise it’s about creating a “we’re the same” sort of malarkey later on. While the traditional depiction of the arrogant genius isn’t completely gone, he’s mostly been shaped into a resentful incel, which would’ve been perfect if they said anything about that to make the change worthwhile. A villain’s motivations don’t always have to make sense (that’s what makes them scary) but they do have to be convincing and there’s a very trite and outdated “bad guy gets captured and monologues in a cage” moment that completely undermines everything the character has done up to that point.
There are some really excellent actions scenes (one of my favourites is Batman escaping the GCPD) but it’s somewhat odd that the two major ones end up a tad lacking by the end. After a cool reveal of the Batmobile, the ensuing car chase is a geographical mess that fails to really showcase anything. And the big climax of the movie fails to have any weight and gravitas despite what ends up happening to the city.
Speaking of the Batmobile, it’s actually a really dull design. I completely understand the premise behind such a stripped back aesthetic and it’s refreshing in the wake of all the overdesigned messes since the Tumbler, but it’s also emblematic of the dull-for-realism design throughout the film (the batsuit is fine but I do have minor nitpicks). As I mentioned before, Catwoman and Penguin have been watered down of their iconic elements due to this adherence to “realism”, a lesson no one seemed to have learned from Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight trilogy” (Dark Knight Rises proved there was a limit to how “realistically” you could depict a Batman story before it failed).
As far as tone goes, I don’t have a problem with “dark and gritty” in general. I mean, if you’re going down the serial killer route then dark is what you want (it’s a little hamstrung by the rating but honestly you don’t need to be a hard R to be good). My problem has always been how unrelenting that darkness is without something to contrast it. If your villain is a sinister monster then your hero needs to be elevated from that or else why the hell should the audience care or notice any difference? (okay so there is at least an answer to that by the end of the movie but we just spent 3 hours watching someone not learn that lesson yet realise it through narration thrown in during post production).
Thankfully, the film’s colour pallet isn’t as bleak as anything Zack Snyder has given us in this sandbox but the depressing sameness of it all does bore you after a while.
Batman movies have often been dictated by what they don’t want to be: the Tim Burton films didn’t want to be the campy 1966 series, the Nolan films didn’t want to be the gothic heightened reality of the 90’s movies, and the Snyder films didn’t want to be good. Ironically, The Batman has a little in common with the late Joel Schumacher’s two films in that they wanted to be like something else (Schumacher wanted a bit more colourful fun like the Adam West series). Matt Reeves and co-writer Mattson Tomlin clearly wanted to emulate Se7en and its ilk and I like that idea (it also wants to be the Telltale games too and that’s fine). When you examine the output from Marvel Studios you notice they hop genres all the time in order to keep things entertaining.
However, I don’t think the attempt at detective-noir works. The scant sprinkling of narration just makes Batman sound like Rorschach and that’s not really what you want.
Some of the themes the movie tries to tackle have so much potential too but ultimately lead nowhere. There appears to be the beginnings of deconstructing the mere existence of a vigilante such as Batman but that thread quickly dies out (and was handled much better in The Lego Batman Movie). The major plot involves power, corruption, and privilege but it doesn’t really say anything about them other than point at them. And while I do admire the attempt to answer the problem about the Wayne family fortune and why isn’t it being used to help Gotham, it sets it aside and just moves on to the next thing. There is a part about utilising social media as a recruitment tool that I did like and appreciate but sadly that felt thrown in last minute.
The filmmakers are being honest when they say they are dealing with certain issues in this movie, for instance, Bruce’s trauma. But dealing with it and actually doing something interesting and with direction are not the same thing.
I don’t want to claim that this is a shallow movie, there appear to be attempts to be more meaningful but either the film doesn’t know how to go deep or it refuses to for fear of deconstructing Batman would break the entire premise. Not to belabour the opening food metaphor but parts of this movie are like biting into that uncooked pizza and ending up with a mouthful of raw dough.
The biggest problems this film has, and I think resolving it may have a knock-on affect that would alter and improve the other issues, are the pacing and length. At nearly 3 hours, this is a dull slog of a movie. Someone else made this observation but the shitty pacing made the film feel as though it were originally intended to be a multi-part limited series for streaming at home. It meanders at all the supposedly important emotional moments as if doing so emphasised how serious and important that scene was.
You could easily cut out 30 minutes if some of the cast didn’t talk and move at half speed (you can pick the reshoots because they were speaking at something that resembled “normal” pace then). You could cut out a further 30 minutes just by tightening the plot and script. It’s one thing to have a complex mystery to unravel but if it’s not supported by good writing then all the layers of complexity are just padding.
The unnecessarily extended runtime and faux-complexity make for an unusual act structure. That in of itself isn’t a problem and we’ve seen it before in much better movies but here it results in one too many endings and climaxes instead of a natural narrative flow, further adding to the observation that this was better suited to streaming.
I didn’t have a bad time with this film, just a frustrating one because all the ingredients were clearly there and yet very little of it worked in relation to one another. All the good stuff is undermined and cancelled out by the bad choices and you sort of end up with a bit of an average and unsatisfying affair overall.
Setting aside that I don’t like the sentiment of “turning your brain off” to enjoy a movie, this film clearly doesn’t want you to do that and yet if you think for more than 10 seconds about any one element it begins to break down or its limitations begin to surface.
This is by no means a bad film but I struggle to call it a good one too mainly because I can clearly see what it was trying to do and the story it was attempting to tell. And you can’t claim studio interference because the filmmakers had a distinct vision for The Batman, I’m just not sure they completely knew how to get there.
I’m so frustrated because this could easily have been great.
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