In the city of Gotham, Mayor Don Mitchell Jr (Rupert Penry-Jones, for some fucking reason) is murdered on Halloween. His murderer leaves a riddle which mystifies the police, including Lieutenant Jim Gordon (gold mine owner Jeffrey Wright), and it falls to the 2-year vigilante Batman (Robert Pattinson) to solve the mystery, putting him into the orbit of "The Riddler" (Paul Dano, more on him later...) and his murderous plot against the worst of the worst...
Okay... So... Where do I begin?
There is a lot of aesthetically pleasing, Gothic, baroque shots which feel right at home in "Batman", and it aims for a brooding tone. Particular favourites still fresh in my mind are Catwoman dropping down into a crime scene. There is a recurring voyeuristic, almost perverse way of shooting things: lots of POV shots, characters framed through windows and the like - I like it. It's kind of cool, and it is trying to tie into a theme and idea. And there is a lot of the Batman stuff people will get a kick out of: Carmine Falcone (John Turturro, ALWAYS welcome, even in a "Transformers" movie) shows up, the story pinches bits and pieces from "The Long Halloween", "Year One", Hush" and even "No Man's Land" for some unholy reason, but I get ahead of myself.
The Batman suit, if that's your jam, looks cool enough, and is even fucking bulletproof here, and Reeves does add some fairly good fight sequences: despite a rather bravura sequence at a stadium towards the end, my favourite was the one illuminated by gunfire in a corridor head-on. In another movie it would seem hacky and out of place, but for a "Batman aesthetic" it works, even if everything is too fucking murky and dark, and not for effect. It works for a while early on, as Batman is monologuing about being in the shadows, and criminals flinch from them in a fairly fitting opening sequence, but when trying to be a mystery movie, full of clues and intrigue, you need to be able to see these clues, and hear what is going on: maybe don't have every single character mumble or growl their dialogue or (in the case of Dano, I'm getting to you) have them talk through a mask which muffles every word. They have taken the wrong lessons from "The Dark Knight Rises" and Christopher Nolan's sound mixing in general...
The Bat-Mobile I guess is a kind of cool rocket car. But it also highlights the tonal issues the film has: Batman is inherently silly, and needs to embrace that angle of it, or go full-on Goth baroque ludicrousness. There are times it attempts this (Falcone's office looks like the city of fucking Rapture, which is fantastic) and there are some flashes of brilliance (the aforementioned shots, and parts where thugs promptly shit themselves upon discovering that Batman is bulletproof, and run away) but when you throw in a rocket car chase with a disfigured crime boss called "Penguin" and have a bulletproof man ninja-kicking rejects from "The Warriors", it can throw a wrench in the class system serial killer story you are trying to tell.
Alright, I've danced around it enough. There are spoilers here (arguably there are spoilers already, but you know, Stephen King once said that a good story cannot be spoiled), so maybe make yourself a cup of tea or watch the Adam West "Batman" series or look up who Rupert Penry-Jones is... okay? Got it?
The film is juggling two or three different things, which is fine (Heaven forbid my movie be ABOUT stuff!), but its central issue is poorly sketched: the mystery of The Riddler's plot is underbaked and takes a sideline to... brooding? It threatens to soar when it has Batman solving clues at crime scenes, uncovering things that the police missed, solving riddles and the like, and encountering suspects in both guises, but these are few and far between. And tying it into "Bruce Wayne" and the "Wayne Family" with a half-concocted backstory cribbed from the Wikipedia notes for "Hush" is a bold choice which doesn't quite pay off.
There is also the issue of the brooding and the themes themselves. This isn't a Zack Snyder situation: Reeves has talent as a film maker.
(Pictured: Zack Snyder's ouevre.)
But they aren't developed, the film makers (correctly, I must add) assume that we kow who Batman is and what he's about, but instead of developing on that, assume that this takes the place of backstory. He is placed as a contrast to the cynical Catwoman (an excellent Zoe Kravitz) but his ideas and world views are not quite explored, we are only ever put into his headspace in one admittedly quite creepy scene where he creates a conspiracy board on the floor and, unkept and barely dressed, he obsesses over the puzzles with his black eyeliner still on. Again, the visuals go a long way to compesating for many parts. Some will prefer these renditions of the characters, is all I'm saying before angry Batman fans pour into my mentions (who am I kidding? Nobody reads this), but insofar as what the film is "about"? Well that's where we get a little wonky...
Dano's Riddler is attacking the wealthy and elite of Gotham. Fine, gottcha, good, I like this plan and understand this plan. Dano is having some fun with the part (when he's allowed to be in the movie, and when he's not muffled by a weird mask that makes him look like Slipknot's fan club president with the budget of 8 quid) right until the film makers tell him what they actually want:
The Riddler is a cunning, brilliant, flamboyant mastermind who wants to prove he is smarter than Batman. He is NOT the cult-like overused shitsack paint-huffing scrotum tearingly overused ballache that is "The Joker". The film makers could not fucking help themselves, they had to do it, they HAD to try and tie it all into Joker and his "deep meaning" (if I see a Batman movie which does not include the fucking Joker in any way, shape or form: I'm going to personally give that script-writer a handjob). Using "The Dark Knight" as their base (it's an inevitable comparison, I'm sorry. Please reset your clocks) has really given them some poor ideas as to what the Riddler is supposed to be...
Oh right, themes and plots and the mystery... A good mystery, I have said many may many times, you can figure out in the first 20 minutes if you're particularly clever, because the main characters have the exact same information that you do and merely look at it differently. This one... never comes together. They catch him, he's some fucking guy, he reveals his backstory as an orphan in Thomas Wayne's orphanage programme, he hates the rich. Cool. Great. Then he delivers a rather cringe-worthy "We're the same Batman! You and me!" speech in his cell-
OH I have to give this tangent because FUCK: so early on Police Commissioner Trevor from Eastenders is yelling at Gordon for allowing Batman to come onto the crime scene, and gives the really clunky line "I let you get away with this because we have some history" and I dunno, that just really made me laugh. That's the kind of shit I'd write, and there are never quite as many amazingly clunky lines as that again... it's a shame...
Anyway, they catch the Riddler, and STILL add an hour's worth of runtime because they want to have another action scene, I guess? And have the Riddler turn the city into a chaos fuelled wasteland which kills and harms the poor because... wait wasn't this about fighting the rich and corrupt? They're fucking fine mate, they've got fucking skyscrapers and live on hills and shit! And don't give me that "he's insane" shtick!
Also he's put into Arkham SUUUUPER quickly after being captured. That's not me nitpicking (well it is) but it just made me giggle. A couple of scenes are like that. I dunno it just flicks between wanting to be grim dark serious and Gothic noir, so those two styles mesh weirdly...
And in one final "Josh can go fuck himself" moment: they couldn't fucking resist.
They could not FUCKING resist it, could they?
The Joker is in this.
FUCK.
OFF.
DO.
A
NEW
THING.
Fucking Christ. And don't give me that "Sherlock and Moriarty" business - you know how many stories Moriarty was in? Fucking 2.
I've gone through a lot of nitpicking and structural issues (that entire last hour can get in the fucking bin) but if you like your Batman mythos and aesthetic, I reckon you'll like it.
Maybe I'm just sick and fucking tired of fucking "grim noir" Batman movies...
Oh, and Paul Dano DOESN'T get beaten up! That's a win!
I don't use the word "pretentious" a lot, as I find it reductive and overused (like The Joker, to be fair...) but here I think it applies.
I know that a lot of wankers are going to dislike it (Ben Shapiro has already shat out a Tweet about it) for terrible reasons, so please, in advance, don't pool me in with them: this has nothing to do with "wokeness" (whatever that even means) or "they got this costume wrong", it's my terrible thought process on a movie.
I find it kind of sad I have to state that, with how toxic discourse about movies has become...
