Matt Reeves, however, made “The World’s Greatest Detective” an epic tribute to Batman without acknowledging an unwelcome detail; that no great American detective film has ever been three hours long. The Maltese Falcon? One hour 41 min. Chinatown? Two and 10. The Batman is a reboot that takes 176 minutes to conclude the story of the franchise in search of a serial killer, who wants to expose something rotten about Gotham City. However, even though this director can be brilliant (specifically his Planet of the Apes films: Dawn of the Planet of Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of Apes (2017)), this running time is nothing more than evidence of shallowness gone mad.
Reeves’ usual combination of disarming earnestness with virtuosity does not work well for casting this picture well as it does not provide any “vision” for derivative imagination which fails when it comes to such common.place material anymore. And so once again, in another comic book metropolis things fall apart and innocence drowns (in almost literal fashion). What slouches towards Gotham? Yet another meant-to-be brooding self-conscious Batman/Bruce Wayne brought to us by Robert Pattinson.
Reeves also places back onscreen major supporters such as loyal Alfred Pennyworth (a.k.a. Andy Serkis); honest cop James Gordon played by Jeffrey Wright; slippery anti-heroine Selina Kyle/Catwoman whose part is acted by Zoë Kravitz; and Edward Nashton/The Riddler—the arch villain himself in at least two different meanings—who is Paul Dano here. Moreover, Reeves together with his co-author Peter Craig stuffs their script with dramatic ammo including John Turturro playing Carmine Falcone—mob boss leading a secret life but discharged like a cap pistol.
Overthrowing Gotham’s mayor through brutal assassination and ending up by the killer’s league of copycats jeopardizing both a new mayor and all her citizens with a cliff-hanger is how The Batman starts off. The villain’s M.O. in this case is patterned after Zodiac Killer’s coded messages; Jigsaw Killer’s torture ploys as shown in Saw (of course) and more Riddler’s riddles. However, although Reeves’ aim was to depict a catastrophic urban decay tale made up of such plots that move from one humorless sadistic joke to another one inching along like a baby taking baby steps in the game of “Mother May I?”.
However, he has not forgotten about being good at making movies since establishing an engaged audiovisual vantage point that keeps us there even if it evaporates from memory in a Gotham minute. Reeves knows how to get us looking through binoculars or peeking into well-leaded windows using light subjective camera work while scrutinizing through layers upon layers of artificial lighting for threats lurking from beneath Sulphur lined shadows within the city (a superbly photographed Greig Fraser). So, when Wayne (costumed: Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver; makeup/hair: Conrad Veidt, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) picks out a bunch of young thugs for his alter ego to deal with, their spooky face-paint could have been borrowed from The Warriors (92 mins.), which had once given comic book urban apocalypse a genuine touch i.e., Baseball Furies.
In this film, Wayne has only recently created Batman such that street hoods are asking who or what he is? Batman responds – ‘I’m vengeance’, however what sounds fierce and vivid on paper or screen seems pompous rather than abstract when spoken during live action epic trying too hard to be L.A Confidential meets Gotham Confidential (L.A Confidential (138 min)).
His study was ebulliently titled The Great Comic Book Heroes, and it studied Golden Age comics as he and his fellow children of the 1930s knew them. Jules Feiffer, a satirist/cartoonist/author/playwright who wrote this book in 1965, characterized those Golden Age comics as unrepentant “junk” saying that junk, like the drunk guy at a wedding party can also get away with anything it says or does because by just being there it is already in disgrace. It has nothing to lose; no respect to be lost; no reputation to endanger. Of all mass media, its values are most anti-middle-class. So we need it.
Comics are now referred to as “graphic novels” not 25-cent “80 Page Giants,” they have PhDs in “comics studies” awarded at universities or comic-book movies which constitute a commercially exploitable foundation for mainstream American film industry should serve as an example of how far things have moved on since then. An utterly respectable movie is Batman. Its violence, mood swings, even Catwoman’s remarks about ‘white privileged assholes’ seem okay by today’s standards of the industry that practically bans spontaneity and anarchy due to their Tinker-Toy construction. But The Batman doesn’t suffer from the oppressive self-importantness of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films or Todd Phillips’s Joker but neither does it reach Tim Burton high peaks. In two wry moments Alfred cracks an important code while Serkis makes intense eye contact and Colin Farrell who acts as Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin—the Rodney Dangerfield of crime—corrects Batman’s misinterpretation of a clue. Although these revelations are too convenient given how much build up there has been.
Such a monomaniacal mope is Reeves’ Bruce Wayne that Pattinson (who does his best despite being engaged and charismatic) can barely crack an … expression. Kravitz’s Catwoman on edge plays off against Pattinson’s angsty Batman (she does some kicky feline fighting), but their relationship seems repressed and does not seem to fit this detective story at all. Why didn’t the long-term depression of Wayne about his parents’—and in this case also, their own murders—convey any sardonic humor? Someday maybe we will get a Bruce Wayne/Batman who can face off with the Joker or the Riddler and simply state, like George Sanders’ Addison DeWitt did, “We have one thing in common – peculiarities”.
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