To be perfectly honest, Matt Reeves’ The Batman reads, on paper, like the kind of film that would piss off legions of critics. It is long, especially for the first installment of a new iteration of the character, clocking in at a girthy 176 minutes, a feat that even a critically-and-audience beloved enterprise like the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t attempt until they had 30-something films under their belt or the kind of fan uprising that ceded final cut to Zack Snyder years after he resigned from Justice League behind it. On the surface, it seems po-faced and brooding, which is the very thing that critics have spent the last decade railing against (and which paved the way for Marvel’s dominance at the box office). Finally, it is a superhero movie, a genre as defined by its popularity as much as the backlash against it, with it being blamed for the sterility of the modern cinematic landscape as well as the IP arms race that has defined so much of film and television culture for the last decade or so. I’m not trying to suggest that this is an underdog by any means, but if one were to point to a particular “Waterloo” moment, sight unseen and based on descriptors alone, this would be a decent candidate (though one would have to pretend that Eternals didn’t exist, as well). It has benefited from almost three years of excitement, through COVID delays and every other tumultuous development in the interim, with each new look generating raves and waves of hype. Could it ever live up to the lofty expectations of its audiences and offset the general malaise that’s taken hold of our critical class?
Well, if you’re me, a decent representative of both of those mindsets — excited nerd, jaded critic — then The Batman is basically the best rejoinder possible. It is an immensely entertaining yarn, full of twists and turns that sees the character return to his roots as a detective as well as some genuinely kick-ass action sequences and a vibe that strives to be as fun as it is intellectually compelling. More importantly, in asserting those choices with pinpoint precision and providing a relatively clear-eyed analysis of the character and his position in the modern world, it offers the best confirmation to date that Warner Bros.’ choice to head down a director-focused pathway, rather than the producer-centric model as emphasized by Marvel, is, if not the right way to counter their dominance on screens everywhere, the most interesting. There are echoes of the bravery of Warners’ past brass, where they were productive and boundary-pushing in their projects, content to lead rather than to follow, which was perhaps their greatest folly in the last decade. It is sure to be divisive outside of fan circles (I don’t expect this to inspire the same rage that other projects have in the last decade), but it is ballsy in a way that I think most can appreciate. As this is a spoiler-free review, I’m not going to list a full plot synopsis and I’m going to try to talk around most of the details, but you should probably know what the film’s about: Batman, in his second year of his mission, comes face-to-face with the Riddler, who is targeting Gotham’s highest-profile citizens. He’ll learn shit about his past, and face off with the Catwoman and the Penguin, while also coming to a profound realization about his place in Gotham City. That’s it. That’s all you’re getting.
It’s impeccably cast, to say the very least, and I hope most can agree with that. Reeves, like Nolan, understands the notion of stacking your bench with character actors to support the big players in their smaller moments, and there are so many recognizable faces within The Batman‘s ensemble that I was stunned and baffled when, say, Peter Skarsgaard shows up for a few minutes to whimper as he did in Black Mass. One might have totally forgotten that John Turturro is in this movie, playing mobster Carmine Falcone, but his presence is a genuinely welcome addition to the proceedings, full of the soft yet intimidating power gleaned from watching a dozen heavies work their magic in any number of Coen crime thrillers. In addition to the fantastic makeup work that went into making Colin Farrell unrecognizable as Oswald “The Penguin” Cobblepot, he understands the film’s modus operandi, which means he’s part De Niro and also part Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a source of intimidation and pathetic, petulant comic relief. Jeffery Wright, fresh off of one of the best performances of his career in The French Dispatch, is a great Lieutenant Gordon (not yet commissioner), who joins Batman on a lot of his investigations, given that both of them are the only people in their spheres that they can truly trust, but he’s very much in Murtagh mode — not only is he too old for this shit, but he’s too old for garbage protocol in the service of the profits of bad men. I really don’t want to say much about Paul Dano’s Riddler, because third-act revelations about his character add another fascinating dimension to his performance, but let’s just say that There Will Be Blood figured heavily in Reeves’ mind, along with another notable influence, and it is perhaps the most interesting Bat-villain performance since Heath Ledger’s Joker, especially with how rarely we see him on screen comparatively. And to round out the non-Bat cast, Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman is cool, and it’s genuinely awesome to see her work doing, you know, heists, instead of low-level cons and jewelry thieving as we saw in The Dark Knight Rises. Importantly, she’s sexy and aware of it, and the film goes to great lengths to both homage De Palma (in scenes evocative of Body Double) and to use those allusions to decent ends.
Finally, of course, we come to the man of the hour: Robert Pattinson, without whom The Batman would not exist in any recognizable form. Plenty of well-meaning film folks assumed that this was a boring day gig for the guy in order for him to secure financing for any number of future Claire Denis or Robert Eggers projects, but there’s something more to that. Is it any wonder that a self-confessed oddball like Pattinson, who prefers to play around with vocoders, drive shitty cars, and hide from the press when he’s not working on projects would gravitate towards a role that is, in essence, a depiction of the divisions between his on-and-off screen life? To say that this aloof and odd caped crusader, skulking in the background in active crime scenes and expressing himself in sheer intimidating physicality — we’re introduced to him via his slow stomps on puddle-soaked subway platforms as he makes his way to stop a gang from demolishing an innocent bystander — is an extension of the actor himself feels like an understatement. Yet it helps that he’s endowed with an arc that makes sense: this Batman is forced to confront the totality of his influence upon the city in a way that Christian Bale’s character always spoke about but rarely ever put into practice, and the way he grows and changes as the film progresses is natural, especially with the tons of space that Reeves has to work with through the three-hour runtime. His Bruce Wayne is a recluse, comforted only by the presence of Andy Serkis’ Alfred, who is more of a bodyguard and financial manager than a butler, in addition to being a second set of eyes in this investigation. They play nicely off one another, with an additional amount of brusqueness befitting the circumstances, but one that is well-established within the canon. Hell, they’ve even got their own equivalent of Aunt Harriet hanging out in the Belfry (which is what I’m dubbing the penthouse Wayne Manor here), which makes plenty of sense given just how young and inexperienced this Batman is. He’s fully committed to using fear as a tool, much as Affleck’s was, but he’s not fully aware enough to realize how much of a nightmare that might be in how it echoes psychically. In short: he is the perfect choice for this Batman, and a lengthy comparison to any other feels, well, wrong, perhaps outside of the source materials themselves.
Reeves pulls from a whole host of specific comic influences here in terms of thematics — Years One and Two, Darwyn Cooke’s Ego, Scott Snyder’s Zero Year — but pairs them nicely with a specifically cinematic aesthetic that feels as in tune with the guiding visual ethos behind the character as represented on screens, both small and large, throughout the decades. There’s a fair amount of Nolan, of course, as both filmmakers have clearly watched a fuckload of David Fincher and Michael Mann films and worked them into their repertoire, but Reeves specifically benefits from being able to pull from later in those filmmakers’ catalogs: those influences, as represented in The Batman, don’t come from Seven or Heat, but from Zodiac (in how Dano’s Riddler is portrayed, and the winding nature of the investigation) or Miami Vice (in any variety of darkened digital nightclub fights, punches illuminated by strobes). Yet, barring the fight near the end of Batman vs. Superman, this feels like the first major acknowledgment of how video games have affected the cultural perception of the character, with both the popular Arkham games and the Telltale series being represented as major influences, in the same way that, say, Adam West’s Batman is present in the design of the Batmobile (with its red accents and blue flame emerging from its exhaust) or hints of the Pfieffer Catwoman reveal themselves in Kravitz’s work. In short, it’s a delightful collection of design choices that feel true to the character, executed with pitch-perfect cinematography and fight choreography. But, again, it’s not wholly limited to the superhero sphere of influence: It just wants to be the best ’90s-style mega-hit that it can be. There are even shades of Tony Scott in the film’s DNA here, with its specifically populist stance (honestly, it may be a better riff on The Fan than Joker was a riff on King of Comedy) regarding the wealth of its lead, in contrast to the heightened poverty of the city he’s serving, and the theatrics of the film’s closing action scene, which evoked aspects of The Last Boy Scout, at least in mind of this viewer.
Perhaps what’s more important is that Reeves made little attempt to fully future-proof his work here, and there’s sort of a knowing acknowledgment that one day, like it or not, aspects of The Batman will drift into camp, no matter what. This is out-of-touch with the methods that both Marvel and other DC properties take in order to forestall the inevitable, as Marvel rolls over and shows you its belly through quips and other forms of forced geniality so that the members of the audience who played Football or Hockey in high school won’t give it a wedgie for introducing Pim the Troll as a pivotal new character to their cinematic universe, and other DC films do their damnest to hit you with shock-and-awe seriousness so that they can stress the gravitas of watching dudes in plastic suits, complete with ab padding, beat the shit out of one another. It also invites comparison to Todd Phillips’ Joker, which demanded that you evaluate it in light of its influences, to say that its self-serious nature wanted the moralist circus that followed its release as a piece of so-called “dangerous” art, which is something that Reeves also avoids. Sure, it has something to say about institutional rot and vigilantism, but it’s more clear-eyed about the necessity of such things in the midst of an inherently unserious work, and it’s there for one to pour over after the film without ransoming its entertainment for Good Boy Points from critics and audiences thirsting for recognition that they are, in fact, literate in media theory. For one, it’s much, much funnier than you might expect from the glum-and-badass nature of the advertising (there’s an awesome scene between Gordon and Batman in an interrogation room that feels like it would have been plucked from a Beverly Hills Cop movie), and its serious goth bona fides are much as they were in Alex Proyas’ The Crow: Cool as fuck, but with a genuine sense of inherent, intended ridiculousness keeping the milk from curdling into maudlin cheese. I pity the folks who won’t be able to see The Batman for what it is — an honest-to-God blockbuster, as we used to know them — thanks to descriptors like “brooding” or whatever, but, at least in my eyes, it’s the kind of superhero movie that, along with something like Spider-Verse, should be the standard-bearer for the genre going forward.