IT WAS A DARK AND GLOOMY KNIGHT

 

MOVIE
The Batman
Director Matt Reeves
Review Ray Chan

How many reboots of Batman is it now? And yet, despite the many incarnations, every adventure of the dark knight since the campy 60s version seems to have been made with one aim: to out-dark and out-grim its predecessor.

    Always a bleaky, dirty Gotham City, shrouded in depressingly gothic architecture, amid miserable, rainy weather. Always a sullen and traumatised Bruce Wayne, torn between being a prince and a protector, and becoming more monosyllabic and guttural with each recasting. Always a grouchy Alfred and serious Commissioner Gordon with no sense of humour.

    It’s more of the same with the latest movie and its new iteration of the protagonist, but amped up to stratospheric levels. It’s directed by Matt Reeves  with whatever the opposite of a light touch is, and stars Robert Pattinson as the caped crusader by night, and millionaire recluse by day, not that it ever is day. 

    Interestingly, as with the recent Spider-Man franchise offerings, there is no origin story. Batman is just there, already renowned as Gotham’s guardian. But rightly so. Really, do we need another retelling of how he came to be?

    Peer beyond the shadows, though, and there is a semblance of a solid tale to tell. The principal evildoer of the piece is the Riddler (Paul Dano), who sets about killing all the city’s top corrupt officials while leaving plenty of collateral damage and cryptic clues for Batman to decipher. Along the way, we see revamped versions of some of the Bat’s criminal coterie: the Penguin (an unrecognisable Colin Farrell) and Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz).

    As you might expect from action productions these days, there are copious amounts of explosions, floods, car chases, hands-on violent combat and other set pieces, but ultimately, nothing innovative of note. It’s like watching firework displays in the sky: spectacular but oh so predictable.

    The general storyline comfortably comes to an end around the two-hour mark, but then – like Wonder Woman 84 and its ilk – a sub-plot is introduced which extends the whole shebang into a seat-fidgeting 180 minutes. It’s as if movie producers these days feel that a movie’s worth is determined by its length.

    But despite these irritations, its relatively linear storytelling form makes this instalment a lot easier to understand than the convoluted narratives of its predecessors, and therefore pushes up the enjoyment factor a small notch. 

    Here’s an interesting sidenote: in the aforementioned Adam West TV movie, our hero tackles four vacuous villains, Bat shark repellent and all. It’s a guilty pleasure to see the quartet all appear again in this latest film, but with malevolence and menace all duly upgraded to suit the times.

#universal #thebatman