The Batman (Directed by Matt Reeves, Warner Brothers, 2022)
For starters at 177 minutes this film is nearly three hours long and it absolutely did not need to be. Avengers: Endgame ran slightly longer at 181 minutes, but that movie was wrapping up story-lines, references and jokes that had been set up in 21 previous movies released over the course of a decade. The Batman was juggling four different villains in barely related plots and rule number one of superhero movies? The more villains you stuff into a film the worse it is going to be.
Despite suffering from villain bloat, the film has a lot going for it including a star-studded cast. Robert Pattinson channels his rage at the Twilight movies into his angry, young Bruce Wayne. Jeffrey Wright (Daniel Craig's CIA buddy in the James Bond films) is fun as always and gets some zingers in as Batman's police buddy Jim Gordon. Zoe Kravitz, Paul Dano, John Turturro and an almost unrecognizable Colin Farrell round out the Whitman's sampler of villains. Farrell deserves extra credit for clearly relishing his role as The Penguin who he plays as a snarling, Coppola-style gangster.
Which is where my other objection comes in. I get that modern directors want to pay homage to the films that influenced them. Lucas and Spielberg wanted to remake 1930s serial films giving us iconic series like Star Wars and Indiana Jones.
For some reason the secret password to getting your Scorsese-homage filmed is to jump on the superhero bandwagon as seen in The Joker (2019) by Todd Phillips.The Batman follows the same title scheme and despite being set in the present day it's heart is clearly in the 1970s. From the stark opening credits to its depiction of Gotham as graffiti-covered and overrun by hoodlums it is clear what era Reeves is longing to direct in. Even the Batmobile harkens back to the age of Serpico being based on the chassis of a late-60s Dodge Charger.
The film captures the atmosphere beautifully and the cinematography is top-notch, but we've seen decaying Gotham City before, along with the constant arguing about whether it can be saved or deserves to be saved. Meanwhile cities in the real world have survived AIDS, crack, personal autos, suburban migration, reckless demolition, double-digit interest rates plus a host of other challenges and emerged stronger than ever. The skyline of today's New York resembles the futuristic towers of Metropolis more than the gritty hell-scape seen in early Al Pacino films.
Also, if Gotham is such a hell-hole, why would anyone live there? New York, even at the worst of times, was the place to be if you wanted to work in finance, fashion, advertising, theater or publishing. It was the Greatest City in the World and it's inhabitants never let you forget that, even if a garbage strike had let six weeks of trash pile up during the summer. That's the Gotham I want to see, not one consumed with self-doubt and morose musings about whether there's still room for hope in the world.
Batman and his supporting cast are a plastic bunch and while I've loved the more grounded take on a billionaire ninja who fights crime with a rocket car? It's starting to become stale. We don't have to go full Adam West, but let's see more knight and less dark.
Finally, while the film was respectful of the source material, something early superhero films often lacked, there were two little bits that struck me as off.
** SPOILERS BELOW **
There's a subplot where it's suggested that Thomas Wayne, Batman's dad, reached out to a mobster to do some dirty work for him. Making Thomas Wayne corrupt is part of that “grit fatigue” trend I mentioned earlier, but why would he reach out to a mobster? He's got Alfred the Butler (played by Andy Serkis aka Gollum from the Lord of the Rings) to do his dirty work. And Alfred is not a dude you want to mess with.
There's a related plot about a reporter working on a story about Martha Wayne, Batman's mom, who in this film was born Martha Arkham. The story was going to reveal that Martha and her family had a history of mental illness. And yes, that would be the Arkham family, of the Gotham Arkhams, the founders of Arkham Asylum, which was inspired by the insanity-filled tales of HP Lovecraft who was haunted by his own history of family madness
I did love Pattinson's reaction to this news and realizing that maybe he wasn't processing his grief in a healthy way, But the Arkham family has always been depicted as nuttier than a five pound fruitcake. Telling the gossipy citizens of Gotham (where Bruce Wayne is recognized on sight by everyone) that the Arkhams are a few sandwiches short of a picnic is like me telling the people of Boston that the Kennedy family has some acquaintanceship with tragedy.
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