THE BATMAN is a BOX OFFICE “No Brainer” but why do I want more?
I can recall one night back in my college days, sitting in the movie theatre with my girlfriend…organizing our popcorn, candy and drinks as we sat down to enjoy some newly released flick and the previews kicked in. Back in the day, previews were a delight because you didn’t see them anywhere else. Maybe you saw a shortened version of them on TV…and maybe you heard an overly dramatic advertisment on the radio but it was nowhere near what it’s like today. The entertainment business has grown exponentially since the “hey day” of movie trailers…now you can watch movie trailers whenever you want and there are multiple cuts and releases of these trailers. Nowadays, if you’re a trailer watcher like myself, you’ve almost seen the entire movie before you even step into the cineplex. But in the seventies and eighties, you didn’t really know what was coming to your local movie theatre until you watched the previews, which started about 15 to 20 minutes before the feature show began. It was a golden age (as all old timers are fond of saying). I cannot even tell you the movie we saw that night because the trailer I watched before it started completely captured my imagination. The year was 1988, and the trailer was the world’s first foray into Tim Burton’s dark and comicly twisted BATMAN.
It goes with out saying that Burton’s BATMAN not only became a pop culture juggernaut that following summer, but captured the collective imaginations of movie fans around the globe. Prior to the film being released, there were petitions to have Michael Keaton removed as the titular caped crusader, but all objections to his involvement ceased immediately upon hearing Keaton utter the words, “I’m Batman.”
1989 was without a doubt, the summer of Batman. In fact, pop culture has never fully recovered from the hit of Batman that it received that year. Since that movie was released we have continuously been exposed to the Dark Knight in myriad forms..he has never gone out of style and has become the most popular big screen superhero next to Ol’ Webhead himself. He’s been played as bland and campy (Kilmer and Clooney) dark, brooding and gritty as all hell by Bale…silly and out of place (Affleck) and now in his latest iteration…dark, gothic and mentally unstable by Robert Patinson.
I will begin by saying I enjoy the character Batman and so I enjoyed the new movie THE BATMAN. It struck all the right chords if you are a die-hard Bat-Phile like myself. A menacing shadowy Gotham filled with towering spires, rattling subway bridges and neon slicked city streets? Check. A brooding an contemplative police chief who is so close to being at his wit’s end that he has taken to working closely with a costumed vigilante to stop his city from bleeding? Check. How about a robust rogues gallery of villains and enough seedy cops and criminal types to make the average big city blush? Yeah…Check!!! Add to that mixture…a haunting soundtrack by Michael Giacchino and the spectral emo swerve of “Something in the Way” by Nirvana. Damn…this sounds like a picture perfect BATMAN flick?!!! Right? Not so fast.
THE BATMAN plays it safe and hits all the notes that it thinks we will like. The RIDDLER, previously played to perfection as far as I’m concerned by Jim Carrey, is a violent little sonofabitch but his crazed murder campaign in Gotham leaves me cold. Paul Dano was obviously used to pantomime certain aspects of SEVEN (starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman) and SAW (I never quite made it through any of those flicks). For all the talk of this being a true character study of Batman’s detective aspects…I didn’t think the mystery was all that compelling or difficult to figure out. I thought Robert Pattinson was perfectly fine as The Bat Man. I’ve read most of the comic books and runs critical to the canon of the Dark Knight…I realize this movie is concerning the period of Batman’s life where he’s learning how to be “BATMAN” (loosely based on Batman Year One and Two by DC Comics) but I was sort of non-plussed by this because hadn’t we already visited that time period with BATMAN BEGINS and DARK KNIGHT (starring my second favorite incarnation of Batman, Christian Bale)? Matt Reaves, the director of Cloverfield and two Planet of the Apes movies, is the mastermind behind this newest adventure of the caped crusader and quite frankly…I feel he did as good of a job as anyone could do trying to give the studio what they wanted. Something that seems edgy and feels edgy but is ultimately retread of things that we’ve seen before and thus is demed safe and palatable to moviegoers who have spent a year and some months crossing themsleves as they walked past movie theatres and are now ravenous for their old friend, Batman. I get it.
To be honest…I was most looking forward to an electrifying and cerebral performance from my man Geoffrey Wright. What I got from that anticipation was a decent portrayal of a character that I thought he would eat alive but in the end…he was just so so. I think that may be the fault of the writers and the director ultimately. There’s one thing that happens a lot in every Batman comic book that I was looking forward to seeing and Matt Reaves and his creative troop missed completely. Jim Gordon, Commisioner Gordon to you and me, has a habit of working late hours and leaving his windows open to his office…perhaps to fumigate his work area from the cigarette he’s been smoking. It is when he is most distracted and confused by a problem that Batman surreptitiously appears out of nowhere standing halfway behind curtains or in the shadows to offer a helpingn hand or pass along some relevant information. This was the type of bro-bonding I was looking for in THE BATMAN and didn’t get it. The relationship between Gordon and Bats is interesting in flashes but doesn’t register on the richter scale like Gary Oldman and Christian Bale. I enjoyed The Penguin if that was supposed to be the Penguin…he was funny and pathetic. Cat Woman could have been more fun, but she seemed a lot cooler in the previews than she was in the actual movie.
Overall, I guess I’m looking for the movies to take a page out of the comics and start exploring Batman’s extensive gallery of super-villains. We have yet to see Batman ascend to next-level superhero status on the silver screen due to him being marooned on reality island. Names such as Clayface, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy and Killer Croc come to mind as I ponder where we could have gone stylistically with The Batman franchise since Tim Burton dared to bring him to the big screen. And is Robert Pattinson looking so glum and dejected as Bruce Wayne because his parents were murdered or because film-makers keep repeating the same old Batman movie tropes. It’s entertaining for sure. We will never get tired of seeing Batman beat the brakes off of the bad guys. It’s cathartic…it’s wish fulfillment and it’s fun. But it’s the same old song.