THE BATMAN: Overwrought & Underbaked

Rating: 🦇⌚️👀

What’s red and black and dark all over? It’s The Batman, of course (not to be confused with Batman or Batman), Warner Bros. and DC’s latest offering on the ever-growing media conglomerate funeral pyre which is the superhero entertainment industry. My enthusiasm for the genre disassembled shortly after the first Avengers movie, but the promise of Robert Pattinson doing Seven in a bat suit and Paul Dano doing whatever Paul Dano does was enough to hook me on day one. I went in expecting some self-serious, heavy-handed goth nonsense which might be good for some laughs - which I got, then promptly lost in a sea of three thoroughly exhausting hours. For all the ridiculous and sublime moments, The Batman handles its one-hundred and seventy-six minute runtime with the finesse of an improvised mail bomb.

Riddle me this: when is a man not a man? When he's a bat, which this version of Bruce Wayne has been for two years. Reclusive and emotionally scarred, R Patt’s Bat stares, broods, and mutters into action to stop the Riddler, here a Great Value Jigsaw putting the screws to corrupt city officials. From there the story fills out with bat-staples Catwoman, the Penguin, and Commissioner Gordon, plus some mafia drama, daddy issues, Nirvana needle drops, vague discussions of privilege, and more and more and more until you realize you've been watching this for longer than Villenueve’s Dune and you'd maybe like to be done now please. We end with an obligatory sequel sting (no prize for guessing the teased character), and the prevailing sense they could've wrapped this up forty minutes prior. It's a shame, considering how strong the bat-vibes pop from the starting gun.

The Batman’s opening stretch (opening half, honestly) is giddy, moody emotainment which had me grinning ear-to-ear like Gotham’s fabled Jokerman. A stalking-murder scored to “Ave Maria,” grumbly crime diary narration played so straight you wonder if the writers never heard of Rorschach, Pattinson smeared with runny black slut-eyes makeup; a cavalcade of capital c Choices which quickly convince that The Batman could be the most fun blockbuster of 2022. If not apparent from the promotional material, this is a DARK, EDGY Batman for MATURE ADULTS (plus children over the age of 13), and as such will feature NO PITHY QUIPS or AUDIENCE WINKS, but thankfully turns out to be PRETTY IN ON THE JOKE. My highest praise of The Batman is that it absolutely nails the atmosphere, constantly pushing against how much straight-faced, performative grit the absurd source material can survive. The contrast is so delightful it achieves transcendence at times: when Riddler FaceTimes Batman to reveal a bonkers rat-cage Saw trap, I thought this might actually be the best movie I’d watch all year.

These unrelenting self-indulgences, the booming soundtrack and the gothic architecture and the David Fincher rips and Pattinson looking visibly ill and Dano’s obscene tic-laden broadness, comprise The Batman’s strongest and most entertaining material. Unfortunately, this is a Batman film and therefore must also be a Batman film - not simply a goofy, brain-genius schlock thriller sharing more DNA with Spiral (From The Book of Saw) than The Dark Knight. The Batman must eventually turn to duties as the latest installment of Movie About That Hero You Like, and any gestures at something more fall flat when considered against the film’s failure to engage with its professed themes on a deeper level. Bruce Wayne is taken to task over his money and entitlement, but we still cheer when he uses the cool bat-toys. The morality of his family is questioned, but it's waved away in a teary scene in which we are assured that billionaire patriarch Thomas Wayne was a nice man after all. Even the cop narrative, which places early emphasis on the rotten, unreformable nature of Gotham’s police department, resolves with the moment where “good officers” finally take a stand like this is a Sorkin script or something. Tepid and embarrassing.

It's even more insulting to consider a work such as HBO’s Watchmen series, a show unafraid to cover these same themes and explore them to the logical conclusion. There's a precedent for meaningfully addressing and subverting complex questions of legacy, heroism, and corruption in comic-based media; The Batman is unconcerned with these topics beyond set dressing to make itself appear more “mature.” Look no further than how this narrative embraces hack tropes of the psychological thriller - the assaulted women, the depictions of mental illness, the pointless shock violence - and you'll find a work with no more intellectual challenge than your average Marvel fare. It is only adult in the sense that it deploys the maximum curse words which a PG-13 rating will allow; it is only bold in how extensively it will traumatize unsuspecting children the world over. Such qualities don't inherently exclude The Batman as an entertaining experience; the problem is that this film runs longer than Tarkovsky’s Stalker, as opposed to the tight ninety of something like Saw VI.

The Batman never pulls anything interesting enough to justify the length, and what starts with delectable gothic absurdity ends as the breed of exhausting which requires a smoke and a shower. I won't pretend I didn't devour the Zodiac ciphers and latex domme boots and My Chemical Romance hairstyles like a pig at the slop trough; it's only that such delights aren't enough to float an ultimately empty-minded mega-movie. Is The Batman more enjoyable than your average annual superhero flick? Almost certainly, but again, there’s nothing here particularly impactful or deeply considered, and visually it’s nowhere near the revelatory, gaudy freakshow glitz of an offering like Burton’s Batman Returns. Whatever quality to be found within The Batman exists solely in the moments where it goes big, goes stupid, and almost dares us to ask if this a joke or not. Were all these morsels worth the rest? I don't know, but I laughed pretty hard when Batman finds a severed digit attached to a car’s onboard USB stick - "thumb drive."