“The Batman” is a needless collage of not only better movies, but more egregiously of better Batman movies as director/co-writer Matt Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig create an utterly inferior and infuriating vision of the Dark Knight.
“The Batman” clumsily pillages shots, plots and whole scenes from David Fincher’s “SE7EN” and “Zodiac”, Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy, and Batman comic storylines “The Long Halloween” and “Zero Year”. It continuously reinforces that not only do those other and better texts exist, you’re not watching or reading them but rather enduring this drivel.
When masked serial killer The Riddler (a screechy and over the top Paul Dano) begins a killing spree of corrupt Gotham City officials starting with the mayor, he compels The Batman (Robert Pattinson) to solve his riddle. This raging, imperfect and currently in his second year caped crusader becomes an instrument to illuminate The Riddler’s grand design.
That design? That Gotham is rotten right to the core. With the help of Lt. James Gordon (the reliable, yet hamstrung Jeffrey Wright) and cat burglar Selina Kyle (a magnetic Zoe Kravitz, relegated to be a prop for Reeves’ violence and voyeurism), The Batman must interrogate Gotham’s underworld puppet masters Carmine Falcone (a Bono/Don Corleone mashup played by John Turturro) and his sub-ordinate The Penguin (the impossibly great Colin Farrell) to get to the truth.
Let’s begin with the rare signs of life in this flogged dead Bat-horse. Composer Michael Giacchino’s (“Up”, “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”) score for “The Batman” is all kinds of wonderful. Much like Hildur Guonadottir’s Oscar-winning score from Todd Phillips’ “Joker” or Hans Zimmer’s “Man of Steel”, Giacchino creates an atmospheric and tonally perfect accompaniment to a deeply flawed film.
Reeves employs Giacchino’s transcendent work to elevate sublime wordless compositions of cinematographer Greig Fraser (“Dune”, “Rogue One”). From a camera mounted to a jib on a moving motorcycle careening through Gotham, or the elegant silhouettes of against the skyline: in isolation, many of these shots are spine-tingling.
In the context of this cosplaying and laborious procedural however, they’re wasted. Not one but THREE needle drops of Nirvana’s “Something In The Way” throughout the film, is just one example of how things evolve from inspired to insipid.
The prosthetically shrouded Colin Farrell as Oswald “The Penguin” Cobblepot leaps through his intended disguise to bring the most comic-faithful screen rendition of this rogue to date. Farrell’s Cobblepot creates a haven for the seedy underbelly of Gotham, wetting his beak (so to speak) to solidify his ascent from middle management to ‘the man’.
Every moment Farrell’s on-screen, there’s an electrical current in the movie, falsely registering signs of life. There’s a pivotal scene Farrell’s Cobblepot berates Batman with a jibe about being “the world’s greatest detective” that instigated the film’s biggest laugh.
Reeves and Craig’s take on the material feels more like a pitch, a feature-length mood board of the kind of Batman film they aspired to deliver. It’s difficult not to address these elements in direct comparison because the product is an inferior tracing over these inspirations.
“The Batman”, in the largest part, attempts to take the thematically perfect “SE7EN” and forcefully “Human Centipede” DC characters to its structure. Clues and media manipulation – trappings of Fincher’s other killer masterpiece “Zodiac” – are of course mined with dynamite instead of a scalpel. From the Zodiac Killer’s lo-fi disguise and use of ciphers, it’s all torn and scrappily applied. As such this raises a paradox between the orchestration of a figure capable of a master plan, and the skittish execution of these crimes.
When Reeves begins to plagiarise whole chunks of Nolan’s series (hand-held hostage video, montage of dying officials, nightclub meetings, tactical civic explosions) you realise that this is not a new take on the material. The filmmakers rely on aping (no pun intended) on the recent and familiar, and don’t even get me started on the bludgeoning homage to “The Godfather” in an attempt to underscore the characterisation of Turturro’s Falcone that made me grit my teeth so heart I think I broke a filling.
Pattinson is a terrific actor, and in bursts, his seething fury behind the new leather suit alludes to great potential in the cowl. Unfortunately, the frustration in the conceit of this Batman is a continual stagnation: you accept that Reeves and Craig design the character to make mistakes. Still, there’s a nihilistic abandon to Pattinson’s Bat that registers as mere death wish stupidity.
There’s a particular scene where Pattinson’s Bruce ‘Broods’ Wayne is sitting in a hospital alongside an injured ally that is arguably the worst piece single performance I’ve seen in the actor’s body of work in over a decade. Pattinson’s recent stellar performances, with a variety of exciting and accomplished directors, signals that Reeves had it in his hands to protect Pattinson from the parts of this performance that didn’t work and couldn’t.
Like Dano’s Riddler, Kravitz’s Selina suffers from being forced to navigate between how they conceive of the character and narrative convenience. Preliminarily formidable, with agency and drive and eventually clumsy and exploited: the result is an infuriating mania. Andy Serkis’ Alfred is re-established as a former instrument of British espionage turned butler/guardian and is swiftly relegated to a mere talking extra.
In all previous cinematic takes of Batman – whether you liked them or not – they attempted something with the material. From camp (“Batman Forever”) to genuine (“The Dark Knight” Trilogy), from mythic (“Batman v Superman”) to monstrous and mythological (“Batman Returns”) – those Batman were at once a singular take and in dialogue with Batman canon. Reeves’ “The Batman” however not only misses the character, but all it can offer is a remixed imitation.
