I was pretty hyped for The Batman but thought it was a pretty big letdown.
I’m a big fan of basically every actor in this but thought they underutilized them.
Robert Pattinson spends all his Bruce Wayne time looking like he was auditioning for Jared Leto’s part in Requiem for a Dream. His hair is in his eyes like he’s a goth from South Park, and did he really have to be such a dick to Andy Serkis’ Alfred? That got old really fast. His voiceover reminded me a lot of Rorschach’s in Watchmen, but it worked a lot better for Rorschach’s character. For someone who’s so good at riddles, it takes him an awful long time to think of how a “rat with wings” could mean a bat.
Billionaires are used to crazies coming out of the woodwork to harass them. They certainly wouldn’t be opening mail willy-nilly.
Jeffrey Wright as Commissioner Gordon here didn’t display any admirable qualities. He seemed to just be there to serve as a tag-a-long to read questions out loud so Robert Pattinson could answer them. I did like his response to Batman saying no guns. “That’s your thing.”
Zoe Kravitz seemed perfectly cast as Catwoman but I didn’t find anything likeable about her character. And at the end, why did she ask Falcone if he remembered her mom? He knows you’re his daughter, right? Of course he does.
John Turturro looked like he stepped off the set of the Irishman but was overall fine.
Paul Dano’s Riddler seemed to be a kind of autist incel with his love of puzzles and interwebz friends.
The standout of the movie was Colin Farrell as the Penguin. He was basically unrecognizable. Props to him. Probably the best moment in the film was his “no habla espanol?” line. Everyone in the theater laughed.
The story was pretty uncompelling to me. The Riddler’s original plot seemed very much like a rehashing of Seven, with Paul Dano playing Kevin Spacey’s character, especially with his dense, crazed journals. I could go with that. But the third act feels like a non-sequitur.
There was no set up to the flooding. No throwaway explanation of these walls in the beginning. “Sometimes I just wish these walls would break and flood the whole damn city away…” moody Bruce says while touching the walls. Anything! Don’t ask me how a city would even get built if you needed walls to hold back water. There’s no hurricane going on. A few feet of water seemed pretty underwhelming.
And the big masterstroke of flooding an entire city and forcing the populus into a low-lying arena? And then having a few incels off Discord meet up and shoot them with hunting rifles (and the one AR-15 a guy somehow managed to get in the gun-controlled nightmare amalgam of NYC and Chicago)? Why weren’t there a million cops shooting the snipers? Cops are big on shooting things.
The Riddler’s motivation for hating Bruce Wayne seemed real weak. He hated these other men because they were corrupt civil servants and hated Bruce Wayne because he was a rich orphan whose dad may or may not have done something shady? Okay…
Felt way too long and they didn’t do a lot with the time. I don’t mind a big conspiracy but they didn’t even show the other mafioso they kept talking about.
Overall, pretty weak and not worth the three hours. And the after-credits “scene” isn’t worth waiting to leave the theater and get pizza for. Trust me.
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