The Batman Smells

I will give The Batman, the latest incarnation of the Caped Crusader — this time starring Robert Pattinson as billionaire/costumed vigilante Bruce Wayne — this: It has a memorable central motif in its score. Almost a week after I saw the Matt Reeves–directed comic-book movie in theaters, the simple, dramatic, escalated repetition of a few notes (yet another stroke of brilliance from composer Michael Giacchino, whose work I first consciously encountered as an essential part of the atmosphere of LOST) has stuck with me.

I wish I could say the same about the rest of the movie, which is, on the whole, something of a mess. Oh, but it’s a very dark mess, you see. The specter of Joel Schumacher’s much-derided Batman & Robin (1997) has scared every live-action Batman interpretation since into being gritty and serious, which has mostly meant covering everything in shadow and contriving semi-plausible explanations for comic-book silliness. Some have pulled this off. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy succeeded at this, to varying degrees. Others, not so much: Zack Snyder’s version of the character is so parodically grim that, among other things, it helped render Batman’s instant blubbering upon hearing the word “Martha” into the pop-culture punchline it is today.

Where does Robert Pattinson’s version of Bruce Wayne/Batman fall along this spectrum? He barely makes an impression. Successful portrayals of Bruce Wayne have at the very least recognized the difference between the man and the bat; the most impressive ones have shown Batman as the “true” version of the character, with Wayne as the façade. The Batman in The Batman is taciturn, moody, and standoffish; Bruce Wayne is . . . those things, but without a mask on. He is largely a cipher, or perhaps a frontman in an ’80s new-wave band. Neither version of him is very appealing.

The central antagonist of The Batman is the Riddler, last seen in a live-action film as ridiculously portrayed by Jim Carrey at his comedic scenery-chewing peak, with his buffoonery nonetheless unsanctioned by co-star Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face. This time, the Riddler, like the Batman, is utterly serious. He is portrayed by Paul Dano as the Zodiac Killer, basically, leaving an elaborate string of clues for the Batman to solve (the film sells itself as an authentic detective story, yet most of the clues are figured out without any real sense of how Batman arrived at the conclusion). It’s always been fun to play a Batman villain — trust me, I know — but ever since Heath Ledger went all-in on the Joker in The Dark Knight, actors seem to treat the villainous role as some kind of immensely complex character portrait instead of something imagined for a product marketed for kids. Dano is no different here. And despite his complete investment in the character, I remained hung up on what I considered the unintentionally hilarious dichotomy of making him a genius sociopath while also forcing his shtick to depend on lame puns. The idea of giving him a QAnon-like Internet following was also pretty silly — and odd, given that the Riddler is, well, correct about the corruption of Gotham that he seeks to expose.

The rest of the cast is talented, but mostly wasted. Jeffrey Wright is adequate as Batman’s police ally Jim Gordon, though he at times tries a little too hard to seem like a grizzled veteran of the force. Colin Farrell is pointlessly unrecognizable as Italian-gangster caricature the Penguin. Zoë Kravitz is uninteresting as — let’s just say it — Catwoman, who has nothing of Michelle Pfeiffer’s allure or ambiguity and gets trapped in a couple of subplots to give her something to do. Andy Serkis is barely present as trusted butler Alfred — who, by the way, actually is not that trusted by Bruce Wayne, who keeps him at arm’s length. That about rounds out the major cast.

They fill a movie that is far too long, with a story that seems complex but is mostly just dragged out. It turns on a mélange of the same themes that live-action incarnations of the character have been working with since Burton: Gotham is corrupt, Gotham’s elite is corrupt, is Batman the same as the villains he fights, can the city be saved, is Batman a symbol, etc. But what made The Batman particularly frustrating was a weird refusal to go all-in on any one of these themes, leaving me with just aftertastes of better-executed examples in prior films, and its abiding atmosphere of dark-dark-darkness.

This hesitation also manifests in the character of Batman himself. While this movie is not exactly an origin story, it does depict a younger version of the character, though it gives us no sense of what motivated him to do any of the things he is doing, or how he acquired the means to do them (other than an aside from Alfred about teaching him how to fight). The Batman of The Batman is presented in an almost skeptical light, while at the same time the movie assumes that we already know everything we need to know about him — e.g., he doesn’t use guns — because, well . . . we already do. While challenging our conception of the character, it takes for granted the very things about him that we are supposed to find appealing, and doesn’t elaborate on them.

The overall defects of the movie sufficed to take me out of the experience of viewing it — I looked at my watch about halfway through, never a good sign for me — and yet there were things I was forced to take account of. The movie centers on a political contest in which the incumbent is assassinated days before the election, yet this seems to have no effect on the race other than making victory for the challenger a guarantee. At one point, Batman, alone in a prison cell with Gordon, must punch him to escape (with Gordon’s tacit permission); escaping the police building, he is chased by angry cops . . . yet later in the movie, he shows up at crime scenes and arrests without any trouble. And Batman survives an explosion and multiple volleys of various kinds of gunfire — including a shotgun blast to the chest — without much effect on him. Yes, this is nitpicky, but the movie asked me to take it seriously, and it failed in this regard.

The Batman wasn’t a total waste of my time. There were some well-shot and memorable images, some of which — Batman walking out of a fiery background framed upside-down from the view of a villain – had already made it into trailers. Some of the action is interesting, though there isn’t much of it; as Kyle Smith mentioned in his more positive review, it is pretty bare in that regard, supposedly in favor of foregrounding the “detective” element. There is promise in the opening scene, in which Batman describes how he hopes to make criminals fear he is always in the shadows, and the conclusion hints that he has maybe figured something out about the nature of his role in Gotham that approaches the thematic depth of the Nolan films. But, on the whole, I found The Batman a dark, joyless slog; I left the theater almost desperate for some of the franchise’s past levity.

But then there is that Giacchino theme, still playing in my head, making me wonder if I missed something.

Nah, I don’t think so.