Review: The Batman (2022)

 The Batman (2022)

Rated PG-13 for strong violent and disturbing content, drug content, strong language, and some suggestive material

Score: 3 out of 5

The Batman is a good movie that could’ve been a great miniseries. It’s a better movie than Joker, a similar attempt at a standalone “dark and gritty” movie based on the Batman mythos that I grew to dislike the more I thought about it. This has everything I liked about Joker’s aesthetics, visual style, and performances, paired with a unique take on Batman/Bruce Wayne as a character that asks some serious questions about his brand of justice and ultimately has its heart in the right place, one where the dark tone served it well. Unfortunately, it’s also a film whose flaws were readily apparent at first glance, above all else in its pacing and structure. It’s close to three hours long and it felt like it, doing little to justify its length and making me think that it was designed with streaming in mind, where one can pause and divide a movie into chunks while they carve out intermissions for themselves. (Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which ran about four hours, was released direct to streaming and divided into six “chapters” and an epilogue for precisely this reason.) This is a movie that I would give a hearty recommendation, but chiefly for when it hits HBO Max, where I imagine its pacing will probably play a lot better.

The film follows a young Bruce Wayne who has been donning the mantle of Batman for a couple of years now but is still rather inexperienced. His emergence has caused a widespread debate in Gotham City about how out-of-control crime has gotten, with the young firebrand Bella Reál (a thinly-veiled take on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) mounting a serious challenge to the current mayor Don Mitchell, Jr. by accusing him of neglecting the city’s poorer neighborhoods and public services. One night, Mitchell is brutally murdered in his home by a masked serial killer known as the Riddler, who specifically calls out Batman to investigate what becomes a serious of slayings of major political and law enforcement figures by the mysterious killer, who leaves riddles at each crime scene that together establish a connecting thread of rage at the political establishment’s corruption and collusion with organized crime. As Bruce follows the Riddler’s trail, with help from Jim Gordon, one of the few officers in the Gotham City Police Department who isn’t on the take, and Selina Kyle, a cat burglar who is herself in trouble with the mob and suspects that they are behind her roommate’s disappearance, it slowly becomes clear that the Riddler’s game involves far more than just taking down some crooked politicians, but that he seeks to rock Gotham City to its core.

The casting of Robert Pattinson as Bruce Wayne was a decision that raised eyebrows when it was first announced, given that his most famous role until then was playing a brooding teenage vampire in the Twilight movies. I personally had no problem with it even if I thought that Edward Cullen was not his best work in the slightest, given that, much like his on-screen partner Kristen Stewart, he’s spent the last ten years in smaller films quietly washing off the scent of those hackneyed stories. Besides, if there’s anyone you want to play a dark, tortured take on Batman, it’s a guy who’s still famous for playing a brooding teenage vampire. Pattinson’s take on Bruce emphasizes his background as a rich kid all grown up, a man whose inherited wealth and the death of his parents have together left him isolated from the world barring his butler/surrogate father Alfred Pennyworth. In short, a weirdo, the kind of guy you’d imagine would dress like a bat and acquire a suite of bat-themed gadgets if he had the money to do so.

And not only does the movie recognize it, it makes him recognizing it and realizing he needs to be more than just “the masked man who beats up criminals” central to his arc. Early on, it’s established that Batman is doing nothing to solve Gotham City’s crime problem, which seems to be constantly surging no matter what he does, because after all, crime isn’t just a problem of a few bad apples and crazy people killing and stealing because they feel like it. No, it’s an issue of poverty, lack of other opportunities, and failed institutions that do nothing to help anyone other than grifters seeking a piece of the pie and then fighting like hell to keep it for themselves, and Bruce himself, as one of the wealthiest people in Gotham City, is part of it, as Selina, a young woman from the wrong side of the tracks, lays out in no uncertain terms. The scenes where Batman pummels crooks at subway stations and in back alleys may be badass, but he’s still just one man, and he’s still making people afraid to walk the streets at night without making law-abiding citizens less afraid. If he wants to solve crime in Gotham, he needs to fix a broken system and go after the people really causing all the problems.

Without getting into spoilers, this central issue frames his interactions with Paul Dano’s Riddler, a vigilante in his own right who, as he is revealed to the audience, turns out to be in many ways a dark mirror of Batman with a disturbingly similar backstory and goals that hit very close to home for Bruce. The Riddler here is the kind of grotesque parody of Batman you often see in the grimmest versions of the character from the comics, or the most scathing deconstructions: Travis Bickle with a mask and a cape, the Zodiac Killer with some kind of higher goal, or Batman with none of his moral code. When he gave his big speech towards the end explaining what he was doing and why, I was torn between sympathizing with his grievances, especially given what Batman had spent the whole movie fighting, and wanting to strangle the little bastard for the manner in which he caused even bigger problems for everybody in Gotham City. He’s somebody who reacts to serious problems in the least productive manner possible, with a vindictiveness calibrated to bring him emotional satisfaction at the expense of not just everybody in his path, but everybody caught in the crossfire, a figure that spirals into the thousands by the end of the film.

The supporting cast surrounding Batman and the Riddler accomplished a lot in bringing this film’s version of Gotham City to life. Zoë Kravitz stole the show as Selina, not only looking the part of Catwoman but making the most of an interesting if frankly underwritten role as Batman’s on-and-off accomplice from a background the opposite of Bruce Wayne’s. She was somebody who stole to pay the bills and keep a roof over her head, at once glamorous in her normal job as a waitress in a mob-owned nightclub but also rough, mean, and willing to do whatever it took to get what she wanted. She seethes at the privilege of Gotham’s elite right to Batman’s face, in a way that suggests that, while she may not know his secret identity as Bruce Wayne, she can still sniff out that he’s a very rich man under the cowl. If this film’s Batman is the superhero of the DA’s office, its Catwoman is the superheroine of AOC’s office. The city’s criminal underworld too is a tangled mess of gangsters, cops, and officials, all played by a host of talented characters like John Turturro as the mob boss Carmine Falcone, Colin Farrell as Falcone’s lieutenant Oswald “The Penguin” Cobblepot, Jeffrey Wright as the lone good cop (and future Commissioner) Gordon, and Andy Serkis in a rare non-mocap role as Alfred. Gotham didn’t just feel like a visually detailed film set, it felt like an actual city plagued with crime and problems.

Matt Reeves’ direction, though, certainly didn’t hurt in making Gotham City look visually sumptuous as well. The look the film goes for isn’t quite gritty realism, but more how we imagine ‘70s New York to have looked through decades of Hollywood movies, combined with modern technology and vehicles; picture the Deuce lit up with the neon billboards of today’s Times Square. He makes exactly the sort of use of darkness and shadows that you’d expect from a movie about a superhero known as the Dark Knight, framing Batman almost like a horror movie monster as he lurks in the shadows waiting for idiots to break the law and then doing the same but even more so with the Riddler. When the film introduces its muscle car version of the Batmobile, all we can make out in large portions of the scene is the car’s headlights and black silhouette as it hunts the Penguin down, him watching in his Maserati’s rearview mirrors as the Batmobile snakes around traffic and closes in on him.

Alas, I’ve been dancing around this film’s main issue this whole time, the reason why I recommend waiting until this movie hits HBO Max before you see it, or at least arriving at the theater with a nice, comfortable cushion and not a lot to drink and fill up your bladder. This is a beast of a movie, and it didn’t really feel like it earned its three-hour runtime. Oh, it’s a movie where stopping to think about it made me appreciate it more, both for what it was trying to do and for what it accomplished, but actually watching it was an endurance session that didn’t exactly just roll along. The plot meanders throughout, veering from Selina’s search for her roommate (and possible girlfriend) Annika to the Riddler’s murder spree to the various corruption scandals in Gotham City to Bruce learning that his father Thomas Wayne was a lot less saintly than he had believed to the Riddler’s final plot against the city of Gotham, and despite its length, it feels like it barely has time to flesh out the connective tissue between them.

Normally, I’d suggest that the movie cut down some of these plot threads and just focus on either Batman vs. the Riddler or Batman vs. the mob, but given this movie’s enormous ambitions, I’d recommend the opposite. Instead of sending this movie to theaters, Warner Bros. should have made it a massive, multi-part prestige miniseries for HBO Max, giving the film multiple hour-long episodes to develop its many plot threads. The film’s pacing certainly feels like it’s meant for stop-and-go viewing at home on a television. The last thirty minutes especially, the culmination of the Riddler’s plot against Gotham City where we see that he’s assembled a following on the internet, felt tacked on, a half-hearted commentary on online radicalization designed to justify a big, explosive finale that didn’t feel especially well-earned. It made for some exciting scenes of Batman fighting an all-out war against a bunch of bad guys in the middle of Gotham, but it added little beyond that and a rather clumsy culmination of Bruce’s character arc.

The Bottom Line

The Batman isn’t the best Batman movie, and should’ve been either shorter or much longer. That said, there’s a great exploration of the Caped Crusader and what he stands for in here, and overall, the movie grew in my estimation as I sat down to think about it. Whether or not you should see it really depends on how you feel about spending three hours in a movie theater, but when it hits streaming, I definitely recommend it.