Ambitious Dark Knight Detective Story The Batman Loses Its Way in the Shadows

The evolution of Batman’s dark screen presence has finally reached the place where he’s able to fade into the shadows completely. Tim Burton’s take on Batman was brooding, fetishistic and deeply weird. Christopher Nolan’s was brutal, techy and paranoid. Zack Snyder’s was weathered, faithless and cruel. And now Matt Reeves’ The Batman is dour and wounded, the newly cowled hero’s adolescent attempts at heroism undermined by sullen single-mindedness. He’s not yet an action figure, but not quite a human. He’s in over his head, stuck in a nearly three-hour detective story that overvalues both realism and style—a movie with plenty of good ideas about how it could tell a Batman story, but one that stitches them together in a way that leaves you wondering how it got those scars. Its Batman nearly dissolves into the night, overwhelmed by and acquiescent to his film’s own noirish ambitions.

The Batman’s crime story—of mob bosses like Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), crooked cops and serial killers—echolocates its tone somewhere between “Ave Maria” and “Something in the Way,” propelled by a Michael Giacchino theme as slow and percussive as the plodding, metallic footsteps of Robert Pattinson’s clunky, inevitable advance. His Bruce Wayne calls himself vengeance, a big title for a guy in his second year of fighting crime. But a corner of Gotham knows him already. When we’re introduced to the movie, in the film’s best sequence, Batman’s reputation lurks in every shadow. We’re made to understand what will eventually come to define the character: Batman is your own guilty fear, reflected back at you from the void. Cinematographer Greig Fraser injects this Nietzschean sentiment with plenty of mood, as flare gun reds and headlight oranges penetrate this Gotham’s endless night. It’s deadly serious and seriously goth. Like, “all-black motorcycles racing through a damp graveyard after an argument on a balcony” goth. It’s always night. It’s always raining.

Murders seem inevitable in this wet gloom. When The Riddler (Paul Dano) claims the life of one of the city’s major players, the police swarm and Batman—judged as more of a cosplaying nuisance than an asset by all but Jeffery Wright’s Jim Gordon, the cop above all other cops—tags along. That’s for the best, because The Riddler’s got his goggled eyes on the Bat, leaving tantalizing ciphers that Gotham City PD is either too dull or corrupt to crack. There would be a little Zodiac in here, if only for the similarities between the killers and the length of time over which it all unfolds, but the puzzles are too cutesy and comicky to inspire fear and any obsessiveness with solving things keeps getting uprooted by the film’s endless half-related detours.

While Batman and Gordon ostensibly race to stop the city’s top brass from getting their heads caved in by a little creep with overly clear motives (bloody words rail against the high-ranking liars he snuffs), the oddly paced structure of The Batman and its meandering noirish misdirections sap tension from the mystery without the colorful vices supplied by its inspirations’ alleyways and speakeasies. Rather, we find more of the same from this character’s world: Empty symbols, familiar scenes and stock roles. A long-suffering, grizzled Alfred Pennyworth (Andy Serkis) here and a slickly flirty Catwoman (Zoë Kravitz) there. A cigarless, ‘ey-tootsing Penguin is almost having fun, but then you realize Colin Farrell is only acting as big as he is because that’s what it takes to get through his ridiculous—in a “Why didn’t they just cast someone who looks like this?” way and not a “Danny DeVito, what did they do to you?” way—prosthetics. All are embroiled in Gotham’s rot, all doing what they always do. All with a dash more of that Gritty Realism everyone seems to want from their superhero movies.

Kravitz is easily the film’s best supporting element, as the talented performer nails the pouty-prickly cadence that trampolines off Batman’s gruff stoicism into flirty punchlines—supplemented by a lithe, tantalizing physicality possessed by both felines and the type of tip-dependent work that’s gotten her wrapped up in this case. If The Batman pared down some of its sequel setup and endless sidetracks rehashing—once again—the deaths of Bruce’s damned parents, there’d have been room for a deeply satisfying Bat-Cat dance. Like much of the film, the groundwork and ability is clearly there, but there’s so much to do and see as Reeves takes us on a trawling tour through his Gotham that there’s little chance to appreciate what feels right.

But some things do. While The Batman shot some of its Gotham in Chicago like The Dark Knight, its city isn’t focused on urban architecture, but anti-architecture. On streetlit emptiness, L stop negative spaces, isolated parking, disorienting scaffolding, liminal underground lairs. Reeves’ production has a satisfyingly scummy groundedness to its design: A scrap metal Bat-Signal, a Riddler in an army surplus mask and parka, a Batman in DIY leather and flimsy wingsuit. The latter’s car is a souped-up Charger; his villains wield nothing more fantastical than Uzis. Yet the character lurching through it all is never as grounded or physical as his surroundings.