"The Batman": review

Summed up in one word, "The Batman" is brooding.

Directed by Matt Reeves ("Cloverfield," the final two Planet of the Apes films of the recent trilogy) and starring Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Jeffrey Wright, John Turturro, Andy Serkis, and Colin Farrell, 2022's "The Batman" gives us a glimpse of the caped crusader's early career, about two years in.

Gotham City's incumbent mayor, Don Mitchell (Rupert Penry-Jones), is murdered during his reelection campaign as he runs against Bella Réal (Jayme Lawson), an anti-corruption candidate. The murderer has left a puzzle for police to solve, and the Batman is called in by lieutenant James Gordon (Wright). Batman, in two years of crime-fighting, has developed a prickly relationship with the police, many of whom resent his presence at crime scenes. As we discover more and more about the main villain, who calls himself the Riddler (Dano), we learn that he was a child in an orphanage set up by the super-rich Wayne family as part of the larger Renewal campaign to revitalize Gotham City. "Renewal is a Lie" is one of the messages the Riddler leaves. In following the trail of clues, with the help of the multitalented Alfred (Serkis), Bruce Wayne/Batman encounters Selena Kyle (Kravitz), a flunky nicknamed the Penguin (Farrell), and Carmine Falcone (Turturro).

This was a long, slow movie, with a run time of nearly three hours. It received a lot of critical praise for finally giving us a Batman who's actually a detective, shown doing plenty of on-the-ground sleuthing, but I found myself not liking the film as much as other critics did despite its virtues. First, there's the matter of the musical score—another lazy effort by Michael Giacchino, who is amazingly talented but also given to minimal effort if he sees an opportunity to create a score that's reminiscent of other, better scores (as he did with the Spider-Man films, where he riffed off Danny Elfman's superior work). While it's true that the Gotham City we see in this version of the Batman story is dark and depressing, generally seen in the nighttime and drenched with rain, I didn't find the setting to be all that mind-blowing. We've seen similarly dark evocations of Gotham in films like "The Joker."

I was also not a fan of the fight choreography, which is one of the things I go to a Batman movie for. I want to see some bone-crunching action, but this Batman comes off as a generic brawler. Maybe we should make some allowance for the fact that Batman is essentially fighting in a suit of armor, but even then, I expect more combat sophistication than what I saw.* Zoë Kravitz's Catwoman also gets some fight scenes, but whoever did her choreography made her look awfully weak whenever she delivered kicks: her blows looked more like love taps. Both Michelle Pfeiffer and Anne Hathaway, the two Catwomen before Kravitz, looked much more powerful (or their stuntwomen looked much more powerful) when fighting. Batman gets a big brawling scene at the end of the film, during which he fights against numerous nameless opponents, but the scene lacked any real tension or suspense; it felt more like something perfunctory, something the scriptwriters had to insert into the story to fill a quota. Action-wise, "The Batman" was mostly lame.

There was also a scene toward the end in which the Batman, in the midst of a city-wide flood, finds a huddled group of people. At first, he beckons the people to leave the huddle, one by one, ostensibly to lead them to safety. Moments later, probably due to bad editing, the scene changes, and we see the Batman simply leading the group away from where they were huddled. To where, we never find out. The scene just didn't make sense to me, and as I said, I think this is because of how it was edited: first, the Batman beckons people individually, then next thing we know, he's leading everyone away from danger en masse. What changed? There were, in fact, several scenes in the final fourth of the film that seemed disjointed.

The biggest problem, though, was the two main leads. Going into "The Batman," I was already predisposed not to like Robert Pattinson in the role—when I saw a preview, showcasing Bruce Wayne's moppy, floppy hairdo, I was already going nuh-uh. This isn't a dig against Pattinson himself—he had already proved how impressive an actor he can be in "The Lighthouse"—but more against the appropriateness of his casting as Batman. I just can't shake the feeling that he was a bad fit for this role. Pattinson lacks the angular face and intense expressiveness of a Christian Bale, or the flinty gaze of a Michael Keaton, or the muscularity of a Ben Affleck. Pattinson is perfect for the broody mood of this version of the Batman story, but as a convincing rendition of Bruce Wayne, I don't think he makes the cut. He's too sullen, too hollow-cheeked and weak-looking despite the director's effort to make him appear brutal. And Paul Dano fails for similar reasons, especially once the Riddler is unmasked and allowed to emote for the camera. Dano often plays wimpy, nerdy, or otherwise weak characters, and while there are some stories where his quirkiness works well ("Swiss Army Man" comes to mind), I think Dano, like Pattinson, is an overall poor fit for this story. Dano's voice was, I think, altered (or Dano himself spoke in a lower register) during most of the Riddler's masked scenes to make him sound more butch, but once the mask was off, he sounded small and effete again. Come to think of it, even Jeffrey Wright, in his role as Lieutenant Gordon, had a lower, gruffer-sounding voice than is Wright's usual. Only Robert Pattinson. ironically, didn't sound as if he were trying to channel his inner Clint Eastwood.

So there was a lot that I didn't like about this movie. I didn't like how the people who picked up the Riddler's clues tended to read them aloud as if we, the audience, couldn't follow along otherwise. I didn't like the insertion, into the script, of the PC phrase "white, privileged" (spoken by Catwoman) into the story as a lame sop to the woke crowd. Although I enjoyed Colin Farrell's performance as the Penguin (he's simply a normal human with a nickname in this universe, not a mutant with flippers), I had to wonder, as other critics did, why Farrell was chosen for the part, only to be so heavily made up as to be unrecognizable (granted, the makeup work really was impressive; there was nothing latex-y about it).

At the same time, the movie had its good points. Bruce Wayne's relationship with Alfred, Wayne's butler and father-figure, while perhaps not as well-developed and rich as the Michael Caine-Christian Bale relationship from Christopher Nolan's movies, was nevertheless warm and dimensional. This Alfred was quite likable, and he really ought to have figured more into the plot. I thought Zoë Kravitz was, overall, a worthy successor to previous Catwomen (I'm ignoring Halle Berry's awful rendition), although her mask was a bit too simple and makeshift-looking. The film's minor villains were ably portrayed; I've already mentioned Colin Farrell (whose Penguin is apparently going to get his own TV series, which I expect to bomb), but I should also note John Turturro's performance as the very scuzzy Carmine Falcone, who manages to exude an aura of creepiness and evil. The movie also does a great job of portraying a thoroughly corrupt police and legal system; Gotham City truly is a mess, a hellhole, a meat grinder for the souls of the idealistic who think (like the Batman) that they can somehow fix the place. This swamp is undrainable. On the thematic level, I did appreciate how the Riddler, who murders only Gotham's most corrupt (until, bizarrely, he tries killing innocent civilians at the end), may actually have been a more extreme version of the Batman himself, willing to murder to eliminate high-level crime—something the Batman famously won't do. There's also a very strong hint that the Riddler, who targets Bruce Wayne as the scion of a perceived-as-corrupt family, knows that Bruce Wayne is the Batman, but when the caped crusader visits the Riddler in Arkham Asylum, the conversation they have is cleverly scripted so that it's not completely obvious the Riddler actually knows what we suspect he knows. There's never a moment, during the hero-villain conversation, when the Riddler looks at the Batman and says, for the CCTV, "I know you're actually Bruce Wayne." In truth, I found the tantalizing nature of the dialogue well crafted.

Overall, though, I don't think I enjoyed "The Batman" nearly as much as other critics did. It had its good moments, and there were hints of cleverness, even genius, in the overall plot, dialogue, and cinematography, but the movie felt slow and draggy despite being punctuated with fight scenes and one (unintentionally?) hilarious car chase. Most of the actors hit their marks well, but I wasn't sold on the performances by Robert Pattinson and Paul Dano, which may have less to do with these actors' level of talent and more to do with their rightness for their respective roles. "The Batman" is dark, brooding, and gloomy; it ends on a note of cautious hope, but I think the film could benefit from tighter editing to trim the run time down and make some of the action sequences a bit more coherent. Watch at your own risk.

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*At one point in the movie, Alfred mentions his time working in "The Circus," which is a nickname for British intelligence's MI6. At another point, Alfred reminds Bruce that he taught Bruce how to fight, so if we put two and two together, Bruce received MI6-level fight training from Alfred. This movie doesn't mention the League of Shadows or any other martial-arts training, but one gets the impression that the foundation of Bruce's combat training comes from Alfred. And maybe that's why Bruce, in this incarnation, looks like a brawler when he fights? I don't know.