THE BATMAN (2022) ★
For me, seeing "The Batman" raised a fundamental question about the world: Does it really need another Batman movie? I count nine in total, starting with the "original" Michael Keaton/Tim Burton "Batman" (1989) and "Batman Returns" (1992), all the way through Val Kilmer's "Batman Forever" (1995) and George Clooney's "Batman & Robin" (1997), until we finally exit the nineties and get a few years of reprieve. Then from 2005 to 2012 the caped crusader's cowl is donned by Christian Bale, who stars in three features directed by Christopher Nolan, each one more tedious than the last.
Following Nolan's trilogy is Ben Affleck's surprisingly interesting take on the character in 2016's "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," which is a terrible film, save for the brief glimpses of Affleck in what is arguably the greatest batsuit ever committed to celluloid, playing the character as the brainy gumshoe he was always meant to be. If we fast-forward past the ensemble storylines of "Suicide Squad" and "Justice League," we end up in 2022 with Matt Reeves' "The Batman," starring Robert Pattinson, and by this point, after fully thirty years of various cinematic Batman adventures, the whole thing has become more than a little stale. How many different iterations of Batman are we to entertain before we begin to question our culture's inability to move beyond comic books and portray something new?
Matt Reeves offers us a Gotham City stylized after the gloomy, dripping metropolis of "Blade Runner," with neon-lit streets and criminal ghouls lurking in every shadow. In an arresting opening scene, Pattinson trudges from the fog of night in one of the better batsuits I've seen, and saves a man being threatened by street hoods by beating the snots out of their leader. He informs witnesses that he's "Vengeance," and from that moment onward, Batman is regarded by everyone in the film as "Vengeance." I think this is strange and grandiose, even for Batman. (He also rarely changes out of his batsuit, but given that Nolan was allergic to putting Bale in one, I suppose it's churlish to complain about this.)
But the odd ticks of Pattinson's "Vengeance" are not what detracted from the story for me. It was the story itself that ruined everything. I found it boring, a contrived adaptation of other nineties comic adaptations of the Batman storyline, one that rehashes the strife of Gotham's political underbelly while failing to add a jot of interest to any of it. When Gotham Mayor Don Mitchell Jr. is murdered on Halloween, Bruce Wayne works alongside Lieutenant James Gordon to decipher clues left by a mysterious killer who calls himself The Riddler. Cue the Detective Batman (or maybe Inspector Vengeance?), who puts his nose to these fairly anodyne riddles and follows their leads to the Iceberg Lounge, which is run by the Penguin.
Colin Farrell's Oswald Cobblepot is probably the best performance of the film, if only for the memorably outlandish prosthetic work he underwent to make him unrecognizable in the role. But in "The Batman," Cobblepot is merely a red herring. Batman and Gordon are operating on the basis of pictures alone - those found on a thumb drive - which show the deceased mayor hanging out at the Penguin's dive with a woman named Annika Kosolov. Cobblepot pleads ignorance, but Batman follows one of his waitresses, Selina Kyle, who just so happens to be Kosolov's bestie. When Kyle's friend vanishes, Batman pushes her to fish for answers at the Lounge, answers that incriminate nearly every city official as being on the payroll of Gotham mob boss Carmine Falcone, played by an oddly-cast John Turturro.
All of this makes for an unnecessarily complicated story for a Batman film, with conflicting interests and intertwined character arcs in numbers that would make even Christopher Nolan blanche. Where previous films were confident enough in their material to let the audience's fandom lend credence to the fantastic relationships between Bruce Wayne and the villain du jour, "The Batman" assumes I'm a DC comic-verse virgin who wouldn't expect (or even understand) an attempt to explain how and why its insipidly sulky Wayne cares so much. Instead of building his character, Matt Reeves and Peter Craig practically wrote Bruce Wayne out of the film altogether, just so they could waste three hours of runtime concocting their labyrinthine plot. By that third hour, it's all too apparent that locking Pattinson in the batsuit was a device to keep audiences from wondering anything about the man behind the mask.
And there are other issues to contend with. Selina Kyle's Catwoman, played by the stunning Zoë Kravitz, is saddled with the worst Catwoman mask I've ever seen, which makes it difficult to take any of her scenes seriously. If your preferred method of protecting your identity is to take a ski mask from Walmart and remove the mask part, your credibility as a cat burglar is shot. Interestingly, Reeves opts to minimize the scenes of Kyle in costume, the inverse of his approach to Wayne. He's clearly interested in letting the audience see her face and ride her emotional rollercoaster with her. Not a bad bet, if only the thrills were there to bolster it, but this Selina Kyle is little more than a narcissistic social justice warrior. Who could be duller than a female antihero who asks Batman if he'll join her and "knock-off some CEO hedge fund types" while pre-judging his response with a "fuck your patriarchal Vengeance" look in her eyes?
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention The Riddler himself, played by Paul Dano, although only peripherally - The Riddler is merely an engine for the far less interesting Carmine Falcone storyline, and is relegated to being background noise in the form of cutesy greeting cards. I found myself wondering why such an alluring villain was given so little screen time. But then again I also found myself rewriting this film as I watched it. I was constantly assigning entirely different motivations to characters like Edward Nashton, Jim Gordon, and Alfred, poor, poor Alfred, who was treated much better and with far more respect by the director and Bruce Wayne in happier Dark Knight days.
--- Bill Fontaine
