Review of Batman: The Killing Joke (2016) by Tracy S — 25 Jul 2016

I'm a fan of Brian Azzarello and Bruce Timm's work usually. You would think that a team like that would be able to add on to someone's work as legendary as Alan Moore paired with Brian Bolland's intensely detailed artwork.

The sad thing though is that this adaption just doesn't really work for me. Both in the prologue and the almost verbatim of the Killing Joke.

Let's go through my problems separately since the movie does feel like two different movies stapled together.

The new prologue stuff is a pretty tough act to follow in a way. Since adding on new content to follow an Alan Moore classic was always a tall order. I'm not even going to get into the controversy of the whole pairing of Batgirl and Batman together. My biggest problem with the prologue is that it felt like Bruce Timm and Brian Azzarello didn't even try to match the dialog or in some respects the tone of the Killing Joke. It feels completely disconnected and more like a solo Batgirl movie, which is fine if this was a solo Batgirl movie. However it isn't and the shift in narrative is jarring to say the least and just as a stand alone story it's kind of run of the mill.

To the Killing Joke portion of the story itself, even though it is almost voiced verbatim there was something off about the whole thing. I actually had to go back and read the Killing Joke comic immediately afterwards to see if the Killing Joke had always been this mediocre. That's when I realized that the animation quality is quite terrible compared to the sharp framing of the comic book.

There are several scenes in the movie where the context of the situation has changed but the words are still the same. Anyone who knows Alan Moore knows that his panel scripting is meticulously detailed so these changes inadvertently change the whole meaning of certain scenes.

For example when the Joker sings his loony song in the comic it's downright unsettling. When he sings it in the movie it's actually kind of funny in a ludicrous schlock way.

Another one is the panel when he asks, "Why aren't you laughing?".

In the animation he's trying to stab Batman with his hand tack weapon while yelling in rage.

In the comic he's looks sad and giving the same eyes of the man he once was before he became the joker. It's a very deliberate reference to the fact that no one laughed at his jokes as a failing comedian leading him down the path to eventually become the joker.

There are many parallels and carefully framed panels in the comic which just don't show up in the animations outside of a few key scenes.

This ultimately diminishes the effects of the Killing Joke despite Alan Moore's writing.

So overall this movie is an odd hodgepodge of ideas and intentions that just comes up short in my opinion.

If they just focused on the Killing Joke portion without trying to pad it out and brought in a better animation group that was more focused on Brian Bolland's deliberate art style. It would have been a much better adaptation in my opinion.