*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Kai Grady’s review here, and Lucia Ruan’s review here.*
The unspoken rule of 21st century comic book filmmaking is to minimize directorial distinctiveness for the sake of visual and tonal continuity across megafranchise entries—Jon Watts’ Spider-Man, Taika Waititi’s Thor, and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther all might mix and match characters and locations in the future, so each of their movies must fit into a narrow, artistically-anonymous aesthetic framework to maximize crossover capabilities without jarring the audience. It’s not just a Marvel Studios problem, either—the same stylistic blandness pervades Venom, Shazam!, Green Lantern, Suicide Squad, The Amazing Spider-Man, and most of Fox’s X-Men movies. The only superhero movie directors with strong, identifiable visual styles—Sam Raimi, Zack Snyder, James Gunn—tend to be the ones who embrace the graphic dynamism of the source material to make movies that look like moving comic books.
But there’s one place in the superhero multiverse that filmmakers can go to make movies that don’t look like crossover-friendly television or live-action graphic novels: Gotham City. Films set in DC’s most famous locale consistently feel more cinematic than other superhero projects. The seedy urban nightmare allows directors to distance themselves from comic book stylization and embrace their filmmaking influences. Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns used maximalist set design and hyper-stylized lighting to echo the moody German Expressionist films of F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang; Christopher Nolan made sprawling Michael Mann crime thrillers on the scale of James Bond with his Dark Knight trilogy; Cathy Yan spun Birds of Prey into an Elmore Leonard/Quentin Tarantino shaggy dog hangout caper with bursts of John Wickian action; and Todd Phillips’ reprehensible “character study” Joker was essentially a watered-down blend of The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver.
Matt Reeves’ The Batman also feels somewhat indebted to Martin Scorsese’s 1976 classic: it renders Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) as a Paul Schrader-esque insomniac outcast who has resorted to vigilante violence in response to the perceived moral decay of his city (and tells us all about it as he writes in his little diary and listens to Nirvana during peak sad boi hours). But the strongest voice of influence over Reeves’ film isn’t Scorsese, or Schrader, or Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz (who bears a striking resemblance to Pattinson’s greasy, chiseled Wayne)—it’s David Fincher, whose pulpy procedurals Se7en and Zodiac remain the high watermark for bleak contemporary detective thrillers. That’s not to say that you won’t be reminded of other cinematic touchstones from time to time while watching The Batman––the antagonist’s opening POV-kill and heavy breathing recall Halloween, and Michael Giacchino’s main musical theme sounds more than a little like John Williams’ Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back—but the film is so thoroughly Fincheresque that if you’ve seen any of that director’s movies, you’ll wish this one was a little more committed to emulating their genuine darkness.
The film follows a young Batman in his second year of crime-fighting as he investigates string of murders by the Riddler (Paul Dano). Reeves and cowriter Peter Craig fashion their Riddler as the Zodiac Killer for the QAnon age: an unhinged conspiracy theorist with a devoted online fanbase who uses high-profile homicides to uncover the truth about the city’s corruption. The Riddler very overtly parallels Batman’s own quest for revenge and justice; as in many superhero movies, the only ideological distinction between hero and villain is the latter’s willingness to kill. In a weaker movie, you’d be distracted by the insinuation that the admirable superhero protagonist is nearly as morally upright as the QAnon stand-in, but Reeves cannily subverts typical comic book movie conventions by displaying how our “hero” is a seriously disturbed guy and a general human disaster. Pattinson offers the most nuanced portrayal of Batman ever committed to live-action film: he has a detached look of determination in his eyes that suggests he’s more at peace when beating the crap out of strangers than having a normal conversation with his butler/surrogate father Alfred (Andy Serkis). The three-hour runtime allows Pattinson to move slower than any superhero has ever moved in an American movie—every step feels heavy with intention, and each microscopic head turn seems stiff, as if he’s recovering from the previous night’s fight that transformed his body into one giant bruise. Or maybe he’s just conserving as much energy as possible so he can fully wail on the next guy who mockingly calls him “Mr. Vengeance”—lugging around 60 pounds of bulletproof leather every night would probably make anyone want to move more efficiently, right? Regardless, it’s clear that Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is not someone you’d want to bump into even on his best day and in broad daylight—he’s a violent emo who watches women undress from across the street and presumably saw all social skills die with his parents twenty years ago. Like many Fincher protagonists, his obsession is what makes him fascinating to watch, and also what makes him a hollow shell of a man.
Every prior Batman has been upstaged by a more charismatic villain: Heath Ledger and Jack Nicholson’s Jokers, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze all have more commanding screen presences than their respective caped crusaders. Reeves’ Batman avoids this trend by limiting the screen time of his antagonists. As the titular hero investigates the Riddler’s killings, he uncovers a local government conspiracy that brings him to blows with mob boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), his right hand man Oswald “The Penguin” Cobblepot (Colin Farrell), and his dubiously-aligned crony Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz). Riddler doesn’t fully appear until the third act (he’s mostly relegated to silent murders and FaceTime monologues), and the rest of the secondary players have long stretches where they don’t appear at all.
All of the performances are compelling in their own ways, but none of them outsize Pattinson. Dano leans into the ridiculousness of the shrill, quivering rage that he previously perfected in There Will Be Blood, but his performance is mostly confined to a handful of scenes at the tail end of the movie. Turturro is more restrained as he quietly manipulates Gotham’s underworld with a soft, commanding voice, while Farrell gives the most bananas performance of the movie under so many prosthetics that they might as well have built an animatronic to play his part. Farrell’s Penguin is the funniest character in the movie because he indignantly dismisses all the other players as idiots while also failing to actually do anything right himself—but nothing about the character’s humor is rooted in Farrell’s particular actorly strengths (of which there are many!), so his casting is all the more puzzling. Kravitz’s turn as Selina serves as an intriguing foil to Pattinson and Dano—she’s also full of simmering rage, but the character doesn’t have the same outlets to externally manifest her vengeance upon the city at large. Instead, her fury remains internalized for the majority of her screen time, and Kravitz’s cold, stoic demeanor nicely embodies Selina’s bottled-up frustration. It’s only in the occasional moments where she explicitly verbalizes her anger that the character starts to feel flat, and that’s due more to shoddy dialogue than performance choices.
The real star of the show, however, is Batman’s closest ally: GCPD detective Jim Gordon, portrayed by a phenomenal Jeffrey Wright. Gordon is a staple of cinematic Batman adaptations—he’s previously been played by veteran character actors like Gary Oldman and J.K. Simmons—but Wright taps into the character’s exhausted desperation in a way we’ve never seen before, fully embracing the buddy-cop dynamic of a grimy procedural. Wright’s Gordon is on the brink of collapse at every moment, constantly seeming as though he’s one grisly case away from quitting the force and moving upstate. He’s hopelessly tired and disgusted by all of Gotham’s grime (if you take a shot every time he exasperatedly murmurs “Christ” or “goddamn” at a bloody crime scene, you’ll die)—in fact, he’s so burnt out that he effectively just lets Batman into the investigations so he can do his job for him. He wants to be a good cop, and is so close to realizing that it’s impossible to do so, especially in Gotham, but he’s still hanging on by the thread of his obsession with justice, practically on autopilot. He’s the character that feels the most like he stepped out of a Fincher movie, which makes him the most compelling presence in the project.
But the film’s ultimate strength isn’t any one character, it’s Reeves’ grotesque vision of Gotham. Like the decaying urban labyrinths of Fincher’s films, Gotham is a horrifying hellscape of a city. It’s always raining, every surface is covered in broken glass, and the thunderous hum of the L train shakes the entire town to its core. Everyone on the street is either a thug, a dirty cop, or an addict; every building is a past or future crime scene. Smartphones suggest that the film takes place around 2021, but the rusty blockiness of the cars on the highways indicate that nobody’s gotten a new ride since the mid-nineties, and the orange glow of exclusively incandescent lights further muddles understanding of the period setting. Despite the crowds, it’s a depressingly lonely town—cinematographer Greig Fraser employs hyperstylized lenses that dramatically blur backgrounds, which makes characters feel more isolated whenever they’re not in the same shot. And the film’s neo-noir lighting and black-and-red color palette further enhance the city’s sense of darkness and grime.
The film’s ultimate problem, then, is its inability to fill its Fincheresque Gotham with a story that’s suitably dark. Part of the issue stems from its PG-13 distance from its R-rated kills. Zodiac depicts the final moments of the killer’s victims in frighteningly intimate detail, walking us through the perverse specifics of their deaths, while Se7en shows all the grisly, putrid textures of elaborate murders as its central detectives investigate. The Batman only allows its antagonist to arrive at the scene of the crime—of the three main kils, one happens entirely in shadows, one occurs with a stylish but timidly indecipherable blurring effect over the images, and the third transpires entirely off-screen. The human stakes of the Riddler’s actions are only briefly felt in a torture sequence where a victim has a bomb strapped to his neck—the other three incidents are disappointingly meek. It feels like a TV cut of a better movie.
But even more egregious is the film’s outright refusal to saddle its Batman with any meaningful darkness to overcome. The movie repeatedly teases a dark, personal facet to the conspiracy that implicates the Wayne family in the city’s decay. But within fifteen minutes of the Riddler’s laughably rushed exposition dump about how Thomas Wayne was a Bad Guy, Actually, the film trips over itself to insist that any wrongdoing on the Waynes’ part was purely accidental, and that Bruce doesn’t need to grapple with his family’s legacy because it’s pretty much untarnished. A more committed version of this movie would disrupt Bruce’s worldview by complicating his relationship with his parents and his past, but it instead feels like it’s severely pulling its punches because it fears a defamation lawsuit from a fictional dead billionaire’s estate.
The film then stumbles into Blockbuster Third Act Mode as it gives Batman a bunch of goons to punch and a stadium full of civilians to save, and Reeves actually pulls off the heroic climax with relative grace despite the clunkiness of the segments preceding it. Botched family legacy subplot notwithstanding, Batman ends up with a simple but effective arc that expands his vigilante mission beyond personal vengeance, solidifying him as a symbol of hope and compassion that can get its hands dirty when traditional systems fail. There’s a particularly striking moment when the flashing lights of a police car go out, leaving a room of desperate Gotham residents stranded in the dark—until Batman lights a flare and leads them out of danger. For all its flaws and shortcomings, it’s moments like these that make The Batman a worthwhile endeavor, because if that’s not a perfect encapsulation of the superhero storytelling’s strengths and complexities, I don’t know what is.