Why so serious? Robert Pattinson's The Batman is a joyless slog
CBC
Every generation gets the Batman it deserves.
The 60s brought us the Bang! Pow! pop art attitude of Adam West. Tim Burton gave us a Gotham both gothic and gorgeous with Michael Keaton's iconic take in 1989. In 2005 Christopher Nolan erased the excesses of the Joel Schumacher era with his terse, growling Dark Knight series.
But Batman may have finally met his match with Matt Reeves' ponderous and posturing take on the crime fighter.
The Batman stars Robert Pattinson as a young man trudging forward on his mission of vengeance.
Not quite an origin story, the film finds Batman in his second year on the job. Bruce Wayne is practically hollow, emptied out by grief over his dead parents, grimly focused on balancing the scales.
Director and co-writer Reeves created a thrilling series with his two Planet of the Apes films, populated by intelligent beasts who wrestled with their all-too-human ambitions. But as Batman, Pattinson is little more than a cartoon.
In a dark and dingy Gotham where the sun never rises, the film is littered with hard-boiled dialogue, Batman whisper-muttering in his opening narration, "The city is eating itself, but I have to try."
In interviews, Reeves has hinted that his interpretation of Batman is more a film noir, more of a detective story than the typical comic book blockbuster.
Nolan, who directed The Dark Knight series, has also talked about the influence of noir in his work. Part of what Nolan admires about the genre is how characters reveal themselves by their actions.
The problem with this Batman is, he does more reacting than revealing. And for all the clues he's given, he's actually a dismal detective.
The main agent of action here is the Riddler, Paul Dano as a giggling masked maniac who is terrorizing Gotham's upper crust as he traps and murders them. With his cryptic notes and cargo jacket, the Riddler comes off as the Unabomber updated as a Twitch streamer.
Again, so much of this is about shock value rather than anything actually scary, since The Batman is handcuffed by its family-friendly PG rating, the result being something like a Saw movie made for Disney+.
As the body count builds, Batman joins forces with Lt. James Gordon — Jeffrey Wright as Gotham's one good cop who has a partnership of sorts with the mopey crime fighter.
While Wayne wears his trauma on his sleeve (next to his grappling hooks), there are other angels in Gotham.