‘The Batman’ Completes the Circle from Sitcom to Self-Parody

In case you didn’t get the memo, after many years of service to the Warner Bros. coffers, Batman has been promoted to The Batman. I hear he didn’t get a raise—or even a third week of vacation!—but was satisfied and gratified just to join the exclusive showbiz pantheon of The Rock, The Boss, The King (whose own Warner Bros. flick is coming in June) and, if you want to go back even further, The Schnozz, anointed with the article.

As I say, Batman was very good at making money for his corporate masters, but borderline incompetent and profoundly unhappy at his ostensible day job. Once upon a time, he took pleasure in breaking up street crimes in progress and bow-tieing crooks for the cops to collect. But like many a former criminal-justice idealist, the caped crusader has become a rainmaker, and a chronically depressed one at that.

What’s that, you say? The Batman is not a Warner Bros. employee and, in fact, works for no one? Oh, you poor benighted sap. He’s part of the Deep State. How else can you explain how Bruce Wayne has avoided being exposed as The Batman by (pick one) TMZ, Peter Thiel, Teen Vogue, Lesley Stahl or Highlights?

But I digress. The insular personal obsession and downward career spiral of everyone’s most relatable dime-store do-gooder—the only one without a superpower, if you don’t count net worth—has brought us to this point: The unrelentingly tedious, three-hour Drive My Batmobile—excuse me, The Batman—is neither a garish comic-book movie nor a spirit-raising superhero movie but a slobbering study of a miserable millionaire’s midlife crisis.

Jack Lemmon is playing The Batman in the afterlife, but in our universe the part falls to Robert Pattinson. Not that it matters which tormented chin is behind the mask; this year’s model is asked to play one note, an earnest, dull monotone, ad nauseum. I can’t imagine that director Matt Reeves is a disciple of Robert Bresson, but the late French filmmaker’s penchant for wringing all the affect and emotion from his actors’ line readings has never been replicated so faithfully (and I’m not forgetting cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger and android Harrison Ford).

The Batman, to the degree you remotely care about the plot, kicks off with the killing of Gotham’s mayor in his own home. The movie begins creepily enough by making us his surveillant, watching through windows until his family departs. His body presents The Batman with a murder mystery that rapidly turns into a paranoid thriller: We know the Riddler is responsible, and he’s embarked on a revenge campaign against Gotham’s true, hidden villains.

The movie offers up more suspects than last week’s episode of Midsomer Murders, with quality actors Peter Saarsgard, John Turturro and Colin Farrell paid to accede to various levels of humiliation. The Batman gains a female ally (and potential love interest, not that he’s capable of feeling anything) in Zoë Kravitz, who is also motivated by—guess what?—revenge.

Haven’t Quentin Tarantino and Liam Neeson wrung the last drop of penny ante “justice” from that trope? Uh huh. So Reeves and company aspire to elevate such base impulses by mimicking the moral imperatives and social commentary of an earlier generation’s “B” movies—the more resonant film noirs.

Alas, The Batman lacks a righteous hero, a fighter for fair play, a good guy with a toolbelt. Its purported champion is so jammed up in his own head, so fixated on his dad’s reputation and legacy, that he’s abandoned the great fight against corruption, exploitation and injustice for selfish, petty concerns. Gotham drowns, and Bruce Wayne dusts and straightens the family pictures in the foyer.

The Batman is a dreary, humorless slog, so I amused myself how and where I could. The all-purpose butler Alfred (Andy Serkis replacing Michael Caine) enters with a cane and an English accent; for a hot second I thought Bates from Downton Abbey had landed a position in America. (Come to think of it, it would be a hoot to see Maggie Smith’s Lady Crawley granted full license to flaunt her inner supervillain. Paul Dano has the dubious honor here.)

The jokes are few and far between in The Batman (hence the urge to write my own), and the laughs are even scarcer. My great regret is that Ingmar Bergman is not alive to polish the script, punch up the dialogue, and inject some humor.

That’s a cheap shot, and I apologize. Bergman had a terrific wit, and his most serious films contain a couple wry chuckles. Occasionally, he could even poke fun at himself. Until The Batman can do that, he’s just Batman to me, no matter what his business card says.