Review: The Batman Is A Gripping, If Hardly Revolutionary, Return To Gotham
Marvel may have multiverses of interconnected superheroes, but none are as iconic as DC’s golden boy, Batman.
It’s unsurprising, then, that he’s reincarnated onto our screens so many times, going back to the 1940s.
The true challenge, of course, is how to keep the character fresh and relevant, and director Matt Reeves is the brave man for picking up the mantle.
Reeves is a director with vision, as his work on the Planet of the Apes movies would prove. Here, Reeves has zeroed in on Batman’s reputation as ‘The World’s Greatest Detective’, and has crafted a more of a psychological crime thriller than a superhero movie.
The Batman takes place in the early years of the Dark Knight’s crime-fighting career. Gotham is being terrorised by a serial killer known as The Riddler (Paul Dano) who wants to expose the city’s corrupt underbelly. His coded messages lead Batman (Robert Pattinson) down a labyrinthian path as he begins to learn how deep the conspiracy goes.
The film’s plot is largely inspired by the murder mystery comic Batman: The Long Halloween, yet movie-buffs will instantly recognise how heavily the film borrows from David Fincher’s neo-noir films Seven and Zodiac.
While it’s very intriguing to see a Batman film play in the serial-killer subgenre, it also falls for most of the tired tropes. The Riddler’s apartment, for example, has every item from the ‘Obsessive-Psycho’ starter pack. While the film does tread familiar territory, it does so in an extremely proficient way.
Reeves masterfully racks up the suspense in the first half of the film and has assembled a superb cast to populate his Gotham. Pattinson excels as a leaner meaner Batman, refreshingly free of the Mr. Universe physique that superhero actors seem obligated to have these days.
Pattinson is closer to the troubled antiheroes of 70s cinema: the grit of Dirty Harry, the inner turmoil of Michael Corleone, and the brooding monologues of Travis Bickle.
Zoe Kravitz does her best, and looks superb, in what is an otherwise unsurprising retread of the Catwoman character, while an unrecognisable Colin Farrell has a criminal amount of fun with the Penguin, serving up a delicious slice of ham.
Unfortunately, it’s the film’s main antagonist who falls short.
While it’s a stroke of genius to redesign the Riddler as a Zodiac-style terrorist, Dano goes way over the top, screaming, cackling, even singing with zero restraint. Dano’s a masterful actor, but just like Jesse Eisenberg in Batman vs Superman, he seems to think that a comic book movie is a green light to go hog-wild.
Where the film truly succeeds is in Reeves’s command of atmosphere and his clear love for the source material.
Out of all the Bat-films, this is the one that feels the most like a graphic novel, a beautifully rain splattered vision of Gotham that’s at once believable and stylized. At an exhaustive three hours, it’s flabbier than the Penguin, and the cataclysmic finale feels out-of-key with the rest, but this is nonetheless a world worthy of a revisit. It may not quite escape the looming shadow of the Christopher Nolan films, but this sets up a thrillingly moody playground for future films.
A gripping, if hardly revolutionary, return to Gotham. The Batman may outstay its welcome but introduces an exciting reinterpretation from Pattinson. There’s life in the old Bat yet.
★★★
Bruce Micallef Eynaud is a creative director and filmmaker, working mainly in commercials and short films. He’s also a movie geek with an MA in Film Studies. His favourite filmmakers are Steven Spielberg, Paul Thomas Anderson and Richard Linklater.
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