Twilight Sad — The Batman review
A version of this was originally published in The Scotsman in March 2022.
Batman begins again in the latest reboot for the Caped Crusader. Starring Robert Pattinson and directed by Matt Reeves, who made the last two Planet of the Apes films, The Batman isn’t quite the radical re-invention promised by the definite article in the tile and the Nirvana cuts on the soundtrack. Covering similar ground to Christopher Nolan’s 2005 version, the film kicks off as a gloomier, moodier, purer riff on Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s 1986 comic book series Batman: Year One, albeit set just over a year or so into Bruce Wayne’s nocturnal war against Gotham City’s criminal element, when he’s still finding his feet as a vengeance seeking psychopath with a penchant for capes, cowls and kicking the crap out of gangs of marauding maniacs.
As Year One did, the film takes some of its cues from Taxi Driver, with a voice-over from Pattinson delivering Travis Bickle-style diary entries recounting his nightly excursions through a crime-infested cesspool. It’s a cinematic influence that immediately brings to mind Todd Philips’s radical repurposing of The King of Comedy in the Batman-adjacent Joker film from 2019. This isn’t just another ersatz Martin Scorsese movie, though. It’s also an ersatz David Fincher film as Reeves reconfigures classic Batman villain The Riddler as a cross between the Zodiac Killer and John Doe from Seven. Played by Paul Dano — riffing on his own creepy turn as the suspected child abductor in Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners — the Riddler is introduced in the film’s unsettling opening sequence surveilling a politician whose progressive public persona masks some personal and professional failings. It’s a great way to open, with Schubert on the soundtrack and restricted point-of-view shots keeping it open as to whether this is going to be the Riddler’s introduction or the Batman’s — a deliberate, thematically relevant bit of obfuscation as it turns out.
But after Batman’s first proper appearance — fighting a gang of Heath Ledger-style Joker clones on a subway platform — the air starts slowly going out of the film as its attempt to suck us into a grim and gritty serial killer procedural is hampered by having a guy in a rubber suit and bat ears working the crime scenes. Batman’s supposed to be a great detective of course and, as he teams up with Jeffrey Wright’s world-weary cop Jim Gordon, this is the first movie to give his sleuthing skills precedence over all those wonderful toys normally found in the billionaire’s arsenal (in the closest thing to a joke, the Batmobile makes one appearance and fails to start right away). But in the labyrinthine plot that ensues, the script requires him to be actively rubbish at solving some of the Riddler’s not-terribly-challenging clues in order to spin out the municipal corruption drama unfurling as yet another power grab erupts between Gotham City’s criminal elements.
At the centre of the latter subplot is Colin Farrell’s Penguin, caked in layers of prosthetics to make him look like Robert De Niro’s take on Al Capone in The Untouchables — all scarred up, all ready-to-erupt menace, all ready for the sequel the film inevitably sets up as Batman rides his motorbike through Glasgow’s Necropolis (doubling for a Gotham City graveyard) in the film’s closing minutes. The film also spends a good bit of time introducing us to Zoe Kravitz as future Catwoman Selina Kyle. Her origins hue closer to the seedier backstory found in Year One, but she also has some parental issues that bond her to Bruce, whose own tragically orphaned status is repeatedly circled, albeit with some intriguing additional details that force him to reassess the morality of his individualistic mission to violently work through his grief for the betterment of Gotham.
Kravitz is great and there’s an intriguing riff on Manhunter as Batman furnishes her with surveillance contact lenses so she can do a walk-through of a crime-scene-in-the-making and gather intel for him. She also manages to generate some heat with Pattinson, who has proven himself a fascinating actor in recent years, with a fondness for the freaky (The Lighthouse), the frenetic (Good Time) and the flashy (Tenet). It’s ironic, then, that his return to a big franchise should give him his most limiting role since Twilight. In the suit Pattinson isn’t all that distinguishable from Christian Bale’s Batman; but his Bruce Wayne still has a bit of a Twilight “sullen Cullen” vibe, just with emo bangs instead of a bedhead pompadour. He’s the goth in Gotham City — though given Batman’s vampire-like existence, that’s actually a fitting comparison, and a slightly more accurate one than the fanciful Kurt Cobain references Reeves has been dropping in interviews (that said, there is an opioid heaviness to the film that fits with its deployment of Nirvana’s Something in the Way as a musical motif).
What’s really missing, though, is any kind of original stamp on the material. Reeves is one of the more thoughtful blockbuster filmmakers out there, but he never quite manages to transcend his influences in the way Nolan did with his Heat-riffing The Dark Knight or Todd Philips eventually managed with his kill-crazy finale to Joker. In trying to disrupt the superhero format by pretending it’s not a superhero movie, Reeves gives us a greatest hits collection of scenes from other movies that just happen to now feature Batman.