I Hated The Batman!

I swear I didn’t go into The Batman thinking I’d hate it. Ok, yes, I couldn’t finish Matt Reeves’ last movie because I couldn’t believe I was seeing a mercilessly grim remake of Apocalypse Now with talking apes. But I liked the talking apes movie he did before that one! I also enjoyed Cloverfield, if not The Pallbearer. But then I haven’t seen The Pallbearer since VHS. Maybe it’s a grower. Who am I to say!

And yes, I was pretty unenthusiastic about everything I heard about this Riddler. My Riddler, as seen in the Arkham videogame series, is Edward Nygma (E Nygma...get it?), a wheedling gasbag wearing a suit covered in question marks, revealing his identity and practically everything else because he thinks you’re too stupid to stop him anyway. And he’s lethally intelligent enough that you can’t just ignore his countless puzzles or dunk his head in a toilet. In The Batman, Paul Dano plays Edward Nashton (E Nashton...I don't get it), covering his entire body in plastic so he won't shed DNA, looking like an ominous cross between David Fincher’s Zodiac and Joel Schumacher’s 8MM. You know…for kids! But hey, maybe he’d at least be hammy.

The buzz on the movie, while positive, tended towards phrases like “The Best Batman Movie Since The Dark Knight.” This told me two things. One, anybody saying that forgot about The Lego Batman Movie. That ruled. Two, The Batman could still suck, like every non-animated Batmovie after The Dark Knight did. So I went in hoping I’d at least get a decent, low-key Bat-yarn focused on detective work.

Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Instead, I finished The Batman with a renewed respect for every Batman movie since The Dark Knight. At least The Dark Knight Rises was honestly ridiculous. Fixing a broken spine with sit ups! Recreating the bomb scene from the '66 movie! Tom Hardy slurring into a cup! I missed it all! At least Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice implied Batman didn’t like watching Man Of Steel. At least they were 10 to 20 minutes shorter. This movie manages to revisit the plot of The Dark Knight Rises with the moral compass of Man Of Steel. Once again, Batman has to save Gotham City from false revolutionaries who believe this town needs an enema. Only now Batman is an incompetent, entitled jerk too busy committing psychotic violence and making himself The Main Character to actually save lives.

While The Batman isn’t another superhero origin story, its caped crusader is relatively green, just two years into the Batbiz. When the mayor is murdered by a puzzle enthusiast (the ease with which everybody says “cipher” suggests all have seen Zodiac), Batman gradually pieces together that Gotham City is profoundly corrupt. That seems likes Year One shit, but I guess it hadn’t come up yet by Year Three here. Presumably due to something impressive that happened offscreen, Detective James Gordon (Jeremy Wright, almost as sotto voce as the Bat) is happy to let The Pointy-Eared Man In Black traipse through crime scenes. But his superiors and servicemen aren’t yet convinced the guy’s worth having around.

Nor should they be. For the first hour of this alleged paean to detective work, Batman is basically MacGruber. He tries to enter a packed dance club through the front door, masked and wearing full body armor, beating security guards with a metal pipe when they deny him entry, completely indifferent when gunfire breaks out (to be fair, the partygoers seem equally unconcerned for their lives). Once inside, he asks The Penguin (Colin Farrell in Robert DeNiro Al Capone cosplay) about a woman in a photo. The Penguin says he knows nothing, and Batman leaves, having achieved nothing but broken noses and glass. MACGRUBER!

Then again, he did notice an intriguing waitress. He follows her home, watches her get undressed through the window with binoculars (a timeless motif), and discovers she’s a skilled catburglar. Cat lady reveals the city’s most powerful people do coke and conga lines in a secret club below the one Batman just bludgeoned through. Batman - having spent the last two years using his brilliant tech to punch facepainted street gangs in subway stations - didn’t know there was a secret club. So he makes the cat burglar go back to the club wearing a wire, constantly offering guidance like “ask about the rat” and “he’s wasted.” Sadly, he didn’t complain she’s tipping too much. MACGRUBER!

The killer, calling himself the Riddler, also knows considerably more than Batman about why Gotham City is such a crime-ridden cesspool. Just as Man Of Steel was nearly a critical character study of an overcompensating red stater who felt entitled to pummel through buildings because of his physical strength and self-certitude, The Batman gets very close to admitting its lead is a rich, entitled jerk more concerned with punching and VIP status than actually using his skills & moolah to improve the miserable dystopia around him. Waking up in the GCPD after he failed to keep the DA’s head from exploding, Batman takes a swing at any cop who thinks he should take off the pointy ears. Sure, he’s a violent vigilante who creates more work for the ER than anything else, but he’s Batman so it’s okay. Duh. Given a chance to escape by Gordon, he uses a parachute suit to artlessly float from the roof to the street floors below. Looking way more like a flying squirrel than a bat, he gets his chute caught on an overpass before faceplanting. It’s easily the most visually thrilling moment of the movie.

(It’s around this time that - if you were watching The Batman on VHS - you’d be asked to switch tapes. It’s underappreciated how much leaving the analog format for digital enabled gratuitously long PG-13 blockbusters. All those double-tape boxes would look bananas on a wall at Blockbuster Video.)

More Gothamites are endangered, when not exploded, as Batman & Gordon haplessly decipher The Riddler’s clues and podcast-worthy narrative of decades-long cultural rot (again, ALL NEWS TO BATMAN). I’d almost argue The Riddler is our hero at this point, but Paul Dano’s penchant for gratuitously prolonged bellows into the camera made me miss the subtle, mellifluous grace of Tobin Bell. The only actor in the movie who manages any gravitas without yelling or squinting is John Turturro as crimelord Carmine Falcone. His casual ruthlessness would be par for course in most mob movies, but it came off like an oasis of maturity in this overwrought, puerile context. I almost forgot I’ve seen a Transformer pee on him.

The film trudges on. Catwoman directly calls out Batman’s self-professed theme of “vengeance” (did he send a PR release about it earlier?). The Riddler expertly upends the social order, even finding time for latte art. Batman stands there looking pissed, clinging to the narcissism of small differences. We get an even grander Not All Cops moment than Christopher Nolan ever offered in his trilogy, and a climax almost identical to The Dark Knight Rises. Once again false revolutionaries threaten to blow up the city, and once again Catwoman puts aside her cynicism to help Batman save the day. Except - spoiler! - this time Batman doesn’t! The bombs go off. We get to watch Gotham City go through an extinction level event while our hero desperately punches the punchable. But Batman - like Superman in Man Of Steel - still gets a vainglorious “helping a handful of people out of the rubble” sequence and yet another monologue about his emotional journey. Because he’s Batman. Sure, Batman’s a psychotic, exhibitionist billionaire who does what he wants and doesn’t actually improve things, but at least he’s trying, damn it. The Dark Musk.

None of this is news about the character. I’ve been enjoying Batcontent since childhood, and have known he’s a rich guy with rage issues almost as long. But this was the first time a movie kept rubbing it in my face while muttering “nonetheless, we stan.” As inane as the Nolan and Snyder and Schumacher and Burton movies could be, their Bruce Waynes seemed to have a concept of scale, jetsetting when necessary and pondering whether the tycoon or the hockey pads could actually do the most good right now. But not this sullen thirtysomething. Reeves claims The Batman was inspired by Kurt Cobain, but the connection is so transparently superficial it’s embarrassing. An aging teenager glowering under bangs while “Something In The Way” plays on screen like it did when Reeves was writing. I don’t know if Cobain would have liked the movie Seven, let alone a four-quadrant, three-hour Seven. Maybe he’d wonder why all these big budget directors can’t make a dark thriller like Taxi Driver or Zodiac instead of a superhero movie that vaguely references Scorsese and Fincher. Maybe Cobain would just squint and tell the interviewer “yeah, I don’t watch movies” after a long vape.

I'll admit, star Robert Pattinson has screen presence. His constant gasface is perfect for a Bruce Wayne who resents just about everybody. He manages to growl without sounding like a constipated Cookie Monster, and I’m genuinely grateful for that. As with Henry Cavill, I can imagine him being enjoyable in a movie where the hero was actually heroic and not just a vain prick. Maybe next time.

Again, I've long enjoyed Batstuff in spite of itself. I’ve spent much of the last decade making Batman do critical strikes and takedowns on my PS3 and PS4, picking up every glowing punctuation mark on my way to 220%. Had they evacuated the city except for 3-5 thugs swinging machetes and bats every so many blocks, maybe I would have appreciated how they brought the cluttered grime of the Arkham games to life. But The Batman took the controller away, laid on the slo-mo and repeatedly asked me to consider what a haunted scion’s vigilante justice in a grody hellscape would really be like. Here’s hoping those new Warner Bros Discovery execs find something better to do.