The Batman reviewed by Mark Kermode

let's talk about the madman the batman so this is the the latest batman done by witch groups i mean not near hefty originally he wrote it but the jam on their first album before the jam uh before the jam that would have been uh um would it have been who were the jam being peters and lee who were the jam being uh the kinks the who yeah so both the kings and the who did versions of the batman theme well done so the who did a version that's on ready steady who and then the kinks did it as part of a live medley because it was a kind of you know it was the song that you did if you were hit um that was obviously from the you know the panic dotage top addict no that's not top ending that's top pop trivia pop knowledge and anecdote so obviously that's around at the time that batman is on television being this kind of pop-tastic thing yeah colorful funny you know exciting blah blah blah yes batman has taken a turn for the darker in the wake of the tim burton batman then it was joel schumacher's and then of course christopher nolan so now the latest version um robert pattinson stepping into the dual role of billionaire crime fighter bloke with a rubber fetish bruce wayne batman this film is set in a rain drenched gotham i haven't seen so much rain since blade runner everything appears to be going very very badly both in the city and also in the head of bruce who is miserable and isolated at the beginning of the film to the point when he seems to have turned into something he doesn't want to be there's an election there is corruption there are murders there are video clues left by a creepy guy with glasses and a face mask and the manner of a kind of typical internet keyboard warrior who's been spending too much time on the dark web the murders come with messages riddles that are fixated with the idea of lying of corruption of everyone being a liar even respectable politicians so the thin blue line hasn't been so much blurred as completely obliterated there's lots of talk about rats flying rats informants in the underworld and vermin everywhere here is a typical clip from the batman who's the mustache with the broken nose [Music] that's kinsey narcotics he's one of the guys that got into it with the iceberg lounge oh [Applause] it is funny how because that for ages was the definitive version of batman the zap kapow boom and then the been a burton which was referring to you know the kind of frank miller and all that stuff that took it into a everyone thought the burden was going to be darker and more gothic than it was and then schumacher made it all kind of pantomime me and then there was no then of course there's the ben affleck batman is you could we is ben affleck still is he is he is the is he in the fashion anyway whatever so um the thing with this version is uh three things the first one is i think everything after the nolan batman's is going to feel a little bit like a footnote correct because those three movies are pretty definitively okay that's what you can do with a an inverted commas a comic strip movie you can make the most expensive art house movie you've ever seen i do remember saying this about batman begins coming out batman begins with nigel floyd and going i've never seen an art house movie cost that much money but it's incredible and i think each one of the you know whatever the pros and cons of the individual um uh batman begins dark night.night returns they are of a piece they are exceptional this looks completely different this is rainy and i mean that beautiful kind of imax photography that christopher nolan gave you know the spectacle this is spectacle but it's like it all there's a lot of the film that looks like you're squinting in the rear view mirror and you can't quite see what's going on because there's so much rain and pestilence in fact there is one chase sequence a vehicular chase sequence in which it's actually quite hard to get a handle on the geography of the chase because the way in which it's shot is so much you know rear view mirror rainy blah blah blah it's kind of a part of me going just stand back for a minute just give me a give me a master shot so i can see where this is happening but obviously that's part of the aesthetic which is that the whole film is meant to feel like kind of completely crammed into it second thing is um i think the cast are very interesting i think that uh zoe kravitz is this kind of you know feline like cat burglar um colin farrell i watched the whole film without really without realizing colin farrell and i have to say incidentally jared leto there that is how you use makeup to create a character rather than to primp and preen and walk around like an idiot doing that ridiculous accent that is how you do makeup acting you make the i believe you know the cat i watched that character there was no part of me that thought that's colin farrell with a whole ton of makeup i didn't even realize it was colin farrell i know that's really stupid because other people have read the articles they will have known that he went into starbucks wearing that you know makeup and nobody recognized him but it's the acting is just you know okay that's how you do it jared leto take a leaf out of his book um i think that actually robert pattinson does a pretty good job because when you think that ever since the twilight movies pattinson has done very brave career moves i mean he's worked with people like cronenberg he's really tried hard to do something interesting with his fame but what's fascinating about the batman is it's the closest to the vampire role of edward cullen that he's done because his batman is basically a vampire he's somebody who you know walks around in the dark looking sullen and rather than edward he was kind of you know all glittery he looks you know he looks gothy and and the whole voiceover is i'm not who i should be everything's awful i'm you know he's full of self-doubt and self-loathing and what we're going to say you were about to i was just gonna i the narration i really i i really struggled with the narration all the way through i don't it didn't need also why is batman narrator why is he why is he in a voice over why is he telling us this story i i i thought that was misjudged okay it didn't bother me in the way that it bothered you um when he was going i'm not who they want me to be i thought i was being helpful and then i realized i was not being helpful but i'm gonna be different and i'm gonna stop i don't want you to cancel the therapy session i just want you to but okay if somebody go biff somebody get out there okay some biffing so in a way that's the point in the same way that what the film does with its comic strip archetypes is closer to what the movie of joker did with the character of joker so for example you know catwoman not quite penguin not quite yet riddler well that's interesting i mean it's like a way of backing off from the cartoonishness backing off and putting it into something which is i mean obviously it's not social realism by anyone but it's kind of backing off and bringing the animal characteristics back into the human so you're just hinting at them with the exception of bat of the batman himself um i think paul dano is you know he's always great in everything and and he you know he is convincingly cracked the fact of the running time bothered me much less than i expected i did go in thinking okay blimey three hours and i when it finished i thought oh all right well that actually that went much faster than i had thought not least because the third act which is always the thing which lets things down i thought didn't i thought the third act was actually pretty decent and it didn't just turn sort of it becomes a bit of a disaster movie yes you say exactly maybe that's why yeah and i love disaster movies and it does indeed turn into a disaster movie rather than turning into a marvel movie rather than turning into a movie in which a bunch of people with very big superpowers or whatever it is just hit each other yes which is what you know the justice league stuff and all that stuff which i'm not interested in it did i think turn into a disaster movie and i like disaster movies i was as i mentioned last week slightly put off by the fact that the critic next to me was yeah and again i apologize for this snotting up like every 10 minutes yeah which was very very off-putting so i need to see it without that as a kind of an impediment but what i would say and i'm sure when i see a second time i'll agree with myself if you're gonna have andy circus in a movie make sure you give him a good roll because he's like thrown away he's in four or five key scenes and but then come on come on it's andy circus i know but i presume and well also there's a thing at the very end in which somebody else who's in the credits it's going to throw forward to it no i missed the last 10 minutes i you know i have to say i was pleasantly surprised not least because i had gone in thinking i mean look i don't think it's it's not the nolan movies it's not uh and you know better than affleck not oh heaven's sake yes oh yes absolutely i think pattinson is actually a good bit of casting i think he does a good job with it and i think if you if you if you're going to go the other way in terms of how we're going to do this that thing about literally making it i think that is squinting in the rear view mirror through rain in the in the dark is the key aesthetic you

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Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 04 2022