Batman the Movie Reference I'm an Open Book Do Your Read

When the title graphic symbol offset sheds his cape and cowl in "The Batman," a moody, methodical and, finally, disappointing render to Gotham City, your initial glimpse of Bruce Wayne might come as a mild stupor. Not considering of the fine actor playing him — it's Robert Pattinson, every bit if you didn't know — but because of the heavy bruises darkening his stake face, as if he'd been wearing a mask beneath his mask. Encarmine beatings are to be expected for a vigilante trawling Gotham'due south lower depths by night, just these particular wounds might well have been inflicted from inside. This Bruce Wayne doesn't await like a playboy or a billionaire, permit solitary a hero; with his unkempt sidelocks and air of morning-after debasement, he'south more like an addict about to crash, or a young rock star gone to seed.

The director, Matt Reeves, who wrote the movie's dense screenplay with Peter Craig, plays upward these associations with an early snippet of Kurt Cobain singing "Something in the Way," a striking of audio-visual anguish that supplies one of the movie's two recurring pieces of music. The other i — variations of which volition before long seep into Michael Giacchino's death march of a score — is "Ave Maria," setting a funereal tone even before information technology pops up at an actual Gotham funeral. Murder is in the air, thanks to the Riddler (Paul Dano), a cantankerous betwixt Ted Kaczynski and Volition Shortz who clearly has a affair for David Fincher movies, given the techniques he's borrowed from the Zodiac Killer and the detail-oriented John Doe from "Seven."

The deadly sins beingness punished here are all sins of betrayal, committed against the people of Gotham past their ostensible enforcers of police force and order. The Riddler's showtime victim is the metropolis's mayor (Rupert Penry-Jones), a loftier-stakes target for a story that soon strands us in a labyrinth of legal, financial and political corruption. We are in a hard-edged, pelting-pelted Gotham Metropolis that, absent either Tim Burton's gothic eccentricity or Joel Schumacher's neon excess, suggests a Manhattan from which bright lights and warm colors have been banished. (The oft oppressively murky images were shot by Greig Fraser, a current Oscar nominee for "Dune.")

Here it may be worth noting that "The Batman" runs well-nigh three hours, though "runs" may non be the word; forgoing pop buoyancy in favor of psychological realism, information technology rumbles forrad with a grim seriousness of purpose that some might well mistake for pomp and pretension. Those who took result, in other words, with Christopher Nolan'southward grave and thrilling "Dark Knight" trilogy (itself inspired past some of Batman's bleaker comic book adventures, including Frank Miller's seminal "The Nighttime Knight Returns"), will observe plenty to object to here.

Their complaints merit some sympathy, but also a little closer inspection. The dourness of Nolan's "Night Knight" films has often been overstated, oftentimes to the neglect of their hurtling narrative velocity, impish wit and gorgeously enveloping images. Really, the problem isn't that there are besides many serious superhero movies or too many frivolous ones. (And later on the pseudo-epic exertions of Zack Snyder'southward "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," who's fifty-fifty to say where seriousness ends and silliness begins?) The problem is that there are as well many of them, period, to the point where even a picture as aesthetic and restrained as "The Batman" — by all appearances a meticulously crafted try to get a tarnished pop cultural phenomenon back on track — may struggle to justify its existence.

Jeffrey Wright as Lt. James Gordon and Robert Pattinson as Batman in "The Batman."

(Jonathan Olley / DC Comics)

Reeves, to his credit, knows the pitfalls of franchise fatigue. As both his 2010 vampire-thriller remake "Let Me In" and his superb recent contributions to the "Planet of the Apes" series made articulate, he has a gift for investing big-upkeep genre filmmaking with a human being pulse, and for putting a fresh spin on well-worn material. And so "The Batman," bold our familiarity with Bruce Wayne'due south inner and outer demons, tries hard to avoid reproducing the formulaic trappings of the origin story. As the moving picture begins, Batman has been on the vigilante beat for two years, and his low-growling voiceover approximates the wearily ambivalent tone of a '70s noir: part difficult-boiled sleuth, function Paul Schrader antihero.

This Batman calls himself "Vengeance," though we are mercifully spared another ugly reenactment of the personal tragedy he's avenging. Just while the murders of Bruce's billionaire parents are left offscreen, that tragedy reverberates insistently throughout a story that delights in turning individual trauma into commonage malaise. To the degree that this expansive story coheres, it does so around a theme of lost kids: As Bruce confronts the truth about his belatedly parents and their not uncomplicated legacy, Gotham itself takes on the quality of a scarred child, repeatedly betrayed and abandoned past those charged with its protection.

Few have been betrayed more cruelly than the Riddler, who, in keeping with this film's downbeat tenor, represents a far less flamboyant take on the graphic symbol than, say, Jim Carrey's. A more than sadistic 1, as well: Clad in a military dark-green mask and jacket that bring sure gun-loving anarchist groups to heed, this Riddler steps out of the shadows to maul faces, sever thumbs and set "Saw"-way traps for the city'due south cocky-appointed elites. He wants to proper noun, shame, game and maim. At every criminal offense scene he leaves behind a cryptic annotation that basically reads "Mr. Batman, I gave you all the clues," initiating a Bat-and-mouse dynamic that forces the Caped Crusader to interact with not but his ally Lt. James Gordon (a fine Jeffrey Wright), simply the rest of the Gotham police force force.

The recurring image of Batman lingering in rooms with outwardly hostile cops — rather than vanishing into thin air, as is his wont — creates an intriguing tension even as it pushes the movie in the direction of an former-school detective procedural. Batman'south investigation plunges him headlong into the twisty, sometimes deadening gangland shenanigans of Ruddy Falcone (John Turturro) and Oz, aka the Penguin, who's played under layers of makeup by an unrecognizable Colin Farrell. Enough has been fabricated of Farrell's attention-grabbing transformation into an iconic Batman villain to make y'all wish that he'd been given something more than interesting to practise than just sneer, scowl and drive like a maniac. As villains get, he's a nonstarter, though Farrell is nimble enough to hint at untapped possibilities; cast this Penguin in a buddy comedy with "Firm of Gucci's" Jared Leto and I'd scout a few minutes.

Robert Pattinson in "The Batman."

(Jonathan Olley / DC Comics)

There'southward much more to the story — a missing girl, a couple of bombs, a dull car hunt, a big-blindside climax — and a few impressive performances, peculiarly from Reeves' brilliant "Planet of the Apes" collaborator Andy Serkis, here playing Bruce's loyal butler, Alfred, with a refreshing absence of motion-capture assistance. And things get livelier when Batman tentatively joins forces with a nightclub waitress, Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), who juggles her own mysterious agendas every bit she slinks her mode around Falcone's inner circle. This latest Batman-Catwoman flirtation has its expected pleasures, though it's disappointing that actors as sexy as Pattinson and Kravitz aren't immune to practise more steal a few smooches on a Gotham rooftop. Like models in an unusually tame leather itemize, they're all suited up with nowhere to go.

Kravitz has been given the outlines, if non quite the substance, of a compelling personal history. Her Catwoman is another of Gotham'south betrayed children, motivated past a desire for justice that sometimes bleeds into a lust for revenge; she exists to remind Batman of his own resolution never to take a human life, merely also to stoke his own impulses toward violence. Purr-sonally, I'm #TeamCatwoman here; having recently seen "Kimi," I can't think of a movie that wouldn't exist improved by having Kravitz show upward with a nail gun.

Batman'due south pacifist high road is noble enough, only similar and then much in "The Batman," it feels like a finger-wagging callback to an overly familiar moral quandary. What separates Batman from all the masked freaks he'south trying to bring down? How stiff a symbol is he, and what exactly does he symbolize? These are questions that have to be made freshly compelling with every relaunch, and "The Batman" ponders them with a sincerity that soon bogs down in obviousness.

It's a movie of alternately promising and frustrating half-measures, in which Reeves' shrewd storytelling instincts and the usual franchise-filmmaking imperatives repeatedly fight to a draw. The tone of "The Batman" is often unpleasant in ways you lot'd look from a serial killer yarn, merely as well ofttimes Reeves teases violence, only to cut abruptly and confusingly away from it; minus the shackles of a PG-13 rating, this movie might peer more than persuasively — and courageously — into the darkness that it so insists upon. Here and at that place, too, the pic gestures toward real-globe politics, especially as concerns race: Notably if somewhat half-heartedly, the supporting cast includes a Blackness female mayoral candidate (Jayme Lawson); a human of Asian descent (Akie Kotabe) who gets beat up on the subway; and a Latino cop (Gil Perez-Abraham) who helps Batman figure out a key piece of the Riddler's latest puzzle.

In these and other moments, "The Batman" seems on the verge of critiquing its hero and the compromises of his own inestimable privilege, to expose some of this Bat's figurative blind spots. But information technology stops far too short, and Pattinson, who played a supremely smug billionaire sociopath in David Cronenberg'due south "Cosmopolis," isn't given the chance to go similarly deep with this nearly iconic of one-percenters. Batman is used to getting upstaged, usually by his more than colorful nemeses, but here he feels upstaged by the inertia of the filmmaking and an attempted renewal — a discussion that is pointedly repeated hither — that lapses too often into retread. In Pattinson's touching but underrealized operation, this Bruce Wayne is a little male child lost, a rage junkie and ultimately a cluttered force for practiced, trying to discover things about himself that the audition has long since figured out.

'The Batman'

Rating: PG-13, for potent violent and disturbing content, drug content, potent language, and some suggestive material

Running time: 2 hours, 56 minutes

Playing: In general release March 4

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Source: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2022-02-28/the-batman-review-robert-pattinson-zoe-kravitz-colin-farrell

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