Review of The Batman (2022) by Buckgotthoughts — 04 Mar 2022

Matt Reeve’s The Batman delivers what will come to be known as the standard for comic book films of the next decade for characters as dark, brutal, torn and interesting as Bruce Wayne. The examination of Batman’s relationship with Gotham as it’s own character is at full display here.

Through following the eyes of Batman and some of his greatest villains, we see the immense pain and torment, as well as a call for justice that bleeds through Batman's soul. The inner workings of the justice system with the criminal underworld bring this to life in a way that has never been examined as well as they are here.

Gotham isn’t treated as a setting, but as a fully fleshed out piece of required understanding to fully calculate why the masked vigilante feels the need to keep fighting when all odds tell him he shouldn’t.

Or at least the way he thinks he should. Robert Pattinson delivers a Batman/Bruce Wayne that you’ve never seen in live action on screen, one which is more akin to the most revered of his comic arcs.

If you aren’t in for a long, bleak, grim and broody journey to understand the dichotomy at play, you might want to steer clear of this hype train. DON’T BRING THE KIDS. This is probably the most adult oriented mainstream comic book film ever.

It’s beyond me how WB didn’t get an R rating for this one. Everyone comes through with a powerhouse performance. From the completely indistinguishable Colin Ferrel as the just right amount of hokey Penguin, to the (unsurprising) high caliber career defining performance from Paul Dano as the Riddler.

He is terrifying as the character, feeling like he was pulled out of a horror film and plopped in this story perfectly. At the same time, while it feels like there is no one who can challenge Batman physically, the Riddler feels like the only one who can overcome him intellectually.

Dano’s Riddler will undoubtedly be compared to Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight and rightfully so. Everyone knows what is at stake here and everyone shows up with their A-game. Reeve masterfully weaves these notoriously over the top comic characters in his extremely grounded film so well, that you could convince yourself they were always real people to begin with.

You may not be able to tell from the previews we’ve had, but it is more in line with movies like Se7en or Zodiac, completely straying from the tones/themes of superhero movies that have run their course for years.

This is the furthest from a bad thing and feels like a breath of fresh air whisked into the genre. I would even go as far as to say, as a massive fan of the genre, that this movie could eventually even rank up there with the most renown noire crime thrillers.

Don’t go into this expecting some action spectacle (but there is still a good amount) but more of a detective story with Batman playing the lead role. There will be some who may find it drawn out and too long and that is fair criticism.

(As with Joker, although this is far from the same movie) There are bits here that can be trimmed to bring the runtime down to a more sharp 2 hours and 30 minutes. But for the most part, I see this only being a gripe for casuals, especially in a time where folks have no issues with binging whole series’ in less than a day.

If you are a Batman fan at heart, there’s just nothing in me that would say you won’t want to walk back in for another 3 hours, or scream for the sequel immediately. Once it is all said and done, and the world has had time to sit with this movie, I feel that there will firmly be two camps on what is the definitive Batman flick.

The Batman or The Dark Knight, and that solely comes down to preference for genre/tone. What we are seeing here is a feat that nobody thought was possible. Matt Reeves has made a Batman film that has potential to dethrone The Dark Knight, and if it doesn’t it will nestle perfectly next to it and be known as one of the greatest comic book adaptations of all time.