A whole meal of a film, practically a mini-series on the silver screen, in which the Dark Knight Detective (a growling Robert Pattinson) teams up with the One Good Cop in Gotham (Jeffrey Wright as Lt. Gordon) to take down the question mark-themed obsessive (Paul Dano, clad in some kinda tactical gimp mask instead of a bowler hat) who’s murdering Gotham’s corrupt elite. The levels of conspiracy in Matt Reeves’s film bring to mind certain passages of Grant Morrison’s late ’00s Bat-books or the early stages of Scott Snyder’s run a decade ago (or the issues of the recent Batman: The Adventures Continue comic book series, continuing the classic animated series, that reference the latter run). I adored how much of the film is Batman poking around crime scenes, like classic shots out of a ’70s or early ’80s issue of Detective Comics filtered through a modern aesthetic. Pattinson is the most convincing “weird rich guy who’d dress up in that outfit” since Keaton, and his rapport with Wright — hell, his rapport with all his allies, including Andy Serkis‘s Alfred (whose every scene, just about, is memorable in some fashion) and Zoe Kravitz‘s Selina Kyle (who I’d love to follow to a spin-off where she’s just cheating dudes and stealing stuff) — is fun to watch shift and evolve as the mission that drives him changes. There are fun twists and there are twists that feel a twist too far (or that twist & twist again too rapidly), but I like where the film lands both in terms of overall story and where it leaves the characters for the inevitable follow-up. It was three hours and twenty minutes if you include the trailers, and yet I’m not against the idea of hitting that again over the weekend — somehow THIS interpretation of the Bat-mythos hit me the same way Burton & Keaton’s ’89 flick did back then, filling me with joy as I watched the Caped Crusader beat down thugs, work through clues, and pursue his foes in his crazy rocket-powered car — all the things you want to see Batman do, larger than life, in a room full of similarly awed strangers. It was everything I wanted it to be. Wow.
