I’ve gotta be honest, this film wasn’t supposed to be on here. It’s The Batman, and not some flabby Ben Affleck version – this was supposed to be a proper movie. It’s gotten great reviews, and it has a great cast. I like Robert Pattinson. I like Zoe Kravitz. I like Paul Dano, and Jeffrey Wright, and Colin Farrell, and they’re all good in this movie… well, most of the time. This movie, though – it’s just ridiculous, and it feels like the brainchild of a teenage boy who’s watched too many movies and wants to show everyone how much he’s learned. It’s shit – an overly long sack of pretentious shit.
The biggest issue for me with this film is that it doesn’t really know what it wants to be. It’s clearly influenced by previous Batmans, and there are obvious nods to the darkness of Burton/Keaton, the gritty realism of Nolan/Bale, and in places, even the camp, cartoonishness of the old Adam West TV show. Now, all of those things can be good on their own, but put together? It’s a weird, jarring mix that doesn’t work and in many places is reminiscent of fellow comic book movie shitshow The Watchmen.
Most of this film feels like it’s supposed to exist in our universe, where Bruce Wayne is a real person who doesn’t have a gadget for everything, where the laws of physics apply, and where there’s some semblance of reality. OK, good, but when you set up your world in that way, you can’t then have your Batman wearing a suit that’s so resilient to bullets that it must be made from vibranium. You also can’t have a car chase – a good car chase – end when the back of a car carrier trailer happens to drop down in just the right place at just the right time for the Batmobile to use it as a ramp and fly as if it’s in Mario Kart, or worse still, the Fast and the Furious.
Another major problem is that all the promotion for this movie was built on the idea that we’d be seeing Batman as the “World’s Greatest Detective,” but is he, really? Sure, he gets to walk around crime scenes with Jim Gordon, but I’m not sure he actually solves anything before someone just gives him the answer. The only thing that separates him from other detectives is that, instead of working out a case by sticking victim and suspect pictures on a board and then using a marker to make notes,
Instead of that, because he’s “great,” he pushes a table to one side in Wayne Tower (which has an interior that for some reason looks like a Medieval castle… It’s a high-rise tower in the middle of the city, and yet on the inside, it looks like a rejected set from Game of Thrones.) So, he does that, throws down pictures of victims and suspects, and then spray paints investigation notes on the floor. If that sounds stupid, it’s because it is. Every element of it is stupid, and worst of all, it doesn’t even lead anywhere. The scene ends – the scene that’s presented as being impactful – and then nothing. It’s never even mentioned again, and the only reason it’s in the movie is because Matt Reeves, a 55-year-old man, thought it was cool.
Ultimately, The Batman is repeatedly undone by choices of style over substance. What’s going to look cool in a highlights reel? What things are movie lovers going to recognize as subtle references to their favorite genre pieces? This is something that also pissed me off about The Joker – stop telegraphing your love of old movies, and just make your own thing.
I wanted to like this movie, and I tried hard for a long time, but it’s just bad. The really annoying thing is that it has all the elements necessary to be really good. ☆
hooked on shit movies 