Robert Pattinson in The Batman
THE BATMAN
You may have heard that The Batman – our umpteenth re-encounter with the world's most downbeat superhero – is long. It is. It's just a few minutes shy of three hours, actually. You may have heard that it's dark. It's really dark. (This film's Batman doesn't enter scenes so much as invisibly bleed into them.) You may have heard that it's serious. Yup. Very serious. At points, almost comically serious.
But if you're wondering whether the combination of long, dark, and aggressively serious applied to material we're all wa-a-ay too familiar with results in a boring movie, I'm happy to report that writer/director Matt Reeves' The Batman isn't boring. Quite the opposite: It's exhilarating – an unexpectedly scary and resonant work that doesn't invite comparisons to Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy so much as David Fincher's Zodiac and Seven. Reeves is a masterful genre filmmaker and the cast for his latest is ridiculously stacked with talent. Yet while watching this transfixing serial-killer flick in comic-book-flick form, I was still utterly floored by what Reeves, his co-screenwriter Peter Craig, and his performance and design team concocted. This may not be the best-ever offering of its type (though I'm open to arguments that it is), but for someone who'd rather watch one of those Finchers a 20th time than Zack Snyder's Batman v. Superman or Justice League a second, it's Heaven, even if its corrupt, decaying Gotham City more accurately resembles Hell.
Beginning with the opening surveillance shot that initially (and literally) keeps us in the dark regarding whether we're viewing events from a hero's perspective or a villain's, Reeves creates and sustains an atmosphere of malevolent dread. You feel it throughout the main storyline that finds Gotham City typically under siege, this time by a murderous psychopath who leaves clues about his future victims – and his own identity – via wordplay, ciphers, and, you know, riddles. (Sorry, no: The killer in question is not Mr. Freeze.) Reeves, however, keeps the exquisite tension humming even when The Batman's narrative heads elsewhere.
That tension is on display in the Scorsese-adjacent nightclub scenes of gangland activity, with John Turturro seductively menacing as Gotham's chief crime lord and an unrecognizable Colin Farrell as a lower-tier hood who somewhat resembles a penguin. (Buried under prosthetics yet enabling us to share in the hammy good time he's clearly having, Farrell gives the performance Jared Leto should have given in House of Gucci.) It's present whenever Bruce Wayne's loyal butler Alfred, a role beautifully re-imagined by Andy Serkis, converses with his employer and friend, expressing concern with a quiet fervor that's nearly inseparable from fear. It's there when Zoë Kravitz's Selina Kyle finds her cat burglar in hot water or turned on (or both at once), and when Peter Sarsgaard's district attorney drunkenly reveals more than he knows he should, and when Paul Dano gets his official Spacey-in-Seven entrance. It's even there in the decency of Jeffrey Wright's not-yet-Commissioner James Gordon, who has to balance his officers' instinctual distrust of the Batman with his belief that this masked vigilante is the true hero that Gordon's almost sure he is. (I'm astounded by how much variety Wright brings to this traditionally thankless role, and he's especially marvelous when, for the benefit of out-of-earshot cops, Gordon's words convey one message while his face is required to deliver another.)
And whether costumed as the Batman or his alter ego Bruce Wayne, tension is very much evident in the haunted, damaged intensity of Robert Pattinson. If you count Will Arnett in the Lego movies, more actors have now played Batman/Bruce on-screen than have played James Bond, and truthfully, there's not much that's new about the character(s) in this latest revisit. Yet despite his voice-over pronouncements that strain for grandiosity and consequently just sound pretentious and silly – “They think I'm hiding in the shadows, but I am the shadows” – Pattinson makes a significant, surprisingly moving impression. When out of his superhero cowl, Bruce's emo bangs may fall artfully over his eyes in ways to make you chuckle. Pattinson's determined, intelligent interpretation, however, is no laughing matter; there's a lifetime of anger, drive, and pain behind that steely gaze. (Unless I was merely projecting, there also seemed to be a moment or two in which, in the midst of some grisly crime scene, Pattinson's Batman actually welled up.) Unlike the Joker, the role of Batman will likely never garner one of its portrayers an Oscar, but Pattinson is riveting here – and, on more than a few occasions, even close to heartbreaking.
For all of the movie's soulful elan, though, Reeves never forgets that the main purpose of a comic-book blockbuster – even one that makes unmistakable inference to Black Lives Matter and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – is the procurement of fun. And this thing is a blast, if a frequently nihilistic one. (We should have expected nothing less from the guy who gave us 2010's stunning vampire downer Let Me In and the two finest entries in the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy.) The Riddler's macabre gamesmanship is relentlessly involving. The stuntwork, much of it presented in long shots that allow us (à la the John Wicks) to see full bodies in motion, is exceptional. A nighttime car chase in the rain is scored by Michael Giacchino, shot by Greig Fraser, and edited by William Hoy and Tyler Nelson with devastating precision and electricity. Despite the grimness, there's even lighthearted wit in many of Reeves' compositions, as when our hero is viewed upside-down (like a bat!) and Farrell's shackled henchman is forced to waddle (like a penguin!). Incredibly, just about everything works in this resoundingly satisfying entertainment, and oftentimes works far better than even the hopeful among us dared to hope. The Batman is long, it's dark, it's serious … and it's seriously good.
