The Batman is a pure distillation of the Caped Crusader, slow dripped over three hours. Sometimes it’s too much, but mostly it’s entrancing.
The film picks up with Batman (Robert Pattinson) about two years into his vigilantism. He’s already established a working relationship with Detective James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) and prowls Gotham’s streets at night, instilling fear in the city’s street-level criminals. After a very-online serial killer (Paul Dano) starts picking off high profile targets, Batman sinks into Gotham’s underground to find answers, which leads to a web of corruption and a reckoning for both Gotham and its self-professed savior.
This is definitively the most faithful cinematic portrayal of Batman. Sure, people get caught up in the utility belt, and the Batmobile, and the punch-em-ups. But Batman is the world’s greatest detective, not the world’s greatest puncher or the world’s greatest tinkerer (although he does both exceptionally well). Batman’s real superpower is to put the puzzle pieces together where no one else can, and The Batman is an unapologetic showcase of that fundamental trait.
To get there, the film plays as a straight-up, linear noir, fitting given Batman originally debuted in May 1939’sDetective Comics #27 to capitalize on burgeoning, stylized Hollywood crime stories. Film noir takes a character with a moral or ethical code (usually a detective or private eye, but not always), pulls them out of their routine, and drops them into a mystery within a morass of cynicality, darkness, and corruption. Sound familiar? That’s where Batman’s grittiness comes from, and it’s an essential element from which all other Batman tropes flow.
Fascinatingly, the film is unabashedly about Batman, not Bruce Wayne. It’s a risky choice, but it pays off. Most Batman adaptations can’t resist throwing in a few scenes with flashy cars and supermodels to play up the Bruce Wayne playboy millionaire side. The dual personality narrative is an easy, digestible through-line, and it’s hard to fault creators for leaning into it. But The Batman actively avoids such a literal representation of that dichotomy, not only by hiding Bruce behind the cowl and a heavy dose of eye black for almost its entire runtime, but also with Pattinson’s portrayal.
This is where we talk about Pattinson, who’s absolutely brilliant. His physicality is off the charts, and not only in the fight scenes. His actions are cold, brutal, and calculated, and he stalks around crime scenes, rooftops, and fire escapes with clear intentionality. What’s just under the surface stands out, too. He’s stoic, but in a way that belies an underlying turmoil and simmering anger. The Batman identity and all its trappings is an easy device through which Bruce both buries and viscerally expels his trauma, and Pattinson gets that across superbly.
The supporting cast deserves recognition, too, especially Zoë Kravitz’s aloof, confident Selina Kyle and Paul Dano’s disturbed, unhinged Riddler. The characters fluidly move around and interact with Pattison’s Batman, in a way that both allows them to individually shine and complement their totemic lead.
The characterization doesn’t stop at the humans, either. Fans of New York movies love to preach about NYC’s value as a character. This film clearly took that sentiment and ran with it. Gotham City is often said to mimic New York, but a film has never so directly and effectively coopted the darker sides of its real-life counterpart. Sometimes this is literal (“Gotham” Square Garden, the Empire State building), but more often it reveals itself in Gotham’s breathing fabric. It’s a sprawling, dangerous place filled to the brim with corruption and decay, and The Batman’s Gotham City tangibly oozes that in spades.
As perfectly as it nails the Bat and his surroundings, The Batman has its flaws. The noir is great, but at times it teeters on the brink of parody, most often in Batman’s drawn-out monologues and some of Pattinson’s solo scenes. For example, there’s a scene in which Bruce sits in the Batcave and removes his eye black to the backdrop of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way.” We quickly find out that the song’s not a needle drop on the film’s soundtrack but is instead actually playing through the Batcave speakers. Bruce is overtly ‘in his feelings’ like this a lot, and when paired with heavy-handed dialogue like “I’m vengeance” (yes, we know), it comes across as too much.
Surprisingly, the much-maligned three-hour runtime didn’t feel too long, but the film does suffer from a ‘too many endings’ problem through its final stretch. This includes a scene with the Riddler and a certain cellmate of his. That scene particularly felt out of place and unnecessary, at least as anything other than a tease for the next installment, and it was disappointing in a film with such clear vision and direction elsewhere.
But mostly, The Batman is everything Batman fans, and indeed movie fans, could want and more, and it’s instantly iconic in a way few films are.
