The Batman (dir. Matt Reeves, 2022)- Review

Superhero movies have always relied on a certain degree of swooning indulgence. But with an almighty squabble over the mantle of the swaggering patriot- from the swashbuckling Flashman so richly parodied in Blackadder, to the War on Terror supersoldier who offered such a seamless projection of Clint Eastwood’s 60’s cowboy persona - 2022’s Batman finds himself in contested territory.

Joaquin Phoenix’s nicotine-hued, Oscar-hoovering Joker of 2019 marked an assertion of DC’s box-office strategy, faced with the well-oiled propaganda machine of the Disney/Marvel Cinematic Universe’s diversified ‘phases’- a ruthless expansion of postwar comic book lore, planned with a precision that 20th century dictators could only dream of. And so we come to The Batman (2022), an offering that plants its flag firmly in the “gritty” camp of realistic dystopia, with enjoyable but disheartening results.

Like a middle-aged man clinging to a loveless marriage, The Batman tries to spice up grim reality with a dazzling array of costumes, gadgets, and open-minded younger women. Stimulating as they may be, these desperate measures point to an unfixable shift in the superhero-audience relationship, where the patriotic Ubermensch of yore finds himself dominated by the unwashed masses.

‘Back in the day’, when Stan Lee’s comic-book empire blossomed out of a pulpy post-WW2 consensus around good guys and bad guys, a whole ecosystem of superhuman saviours bloomed from the fantasy woodwork as a panacea for social ills- be they Cold War angst or the sexual frustration of middle-class American guys. Rather like today’s political strongmen, from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin, a ‘chosen one’ could arise from the pages of the weekly press, to slaughter the gathering menaces of everyday life. In short, the public could follow in the footsteps of a 1950s housewife and outsource a dirty tussle with the outside world to an almost Arthurian ‘champion’- leaving them free to tend to the hoover and the tuna salad.

The Batman, like any decent superhero fare, takes real-world problems as its subject matter; in 2022, these all-American problems blend into Hollywood razzle-dazzle with alarming ease. Robert Battinson’s titular caped crusader sweats not only under his nipple-skirting body armour, but the burden of being a privileged white bloke in a crime-ridden metropolis seething under the failures of its neoliberal administration.

Any good hero epic promises escapism, plus relatability. Gilgamesh, the 4000-odd year old Sumerian protagonist of our oldest recorded human story, had superhuman strength along with homoerotic bromance. Superman had a boring office job alongside extraterrestrial roid-rage. Batman, as many commentators have observed, brings nothing to the table but a big old inheritance from mummy and daddy, plus a bulletproof gimpsuit. He therefore faces a particular challenge in fulfilling the role he was born to- that of the simple, unifying figurehead who can sweep an entire anxious public off its feet.

Working with a limited degree of fantasy- with no magical or supernatural powers beyond a cushy trust fund- The Batman rests heavily upon its universal, unattainable plot points of sex and money. Matt Reeves’ film magnifies everyday problems- disenfranchisement, fear of internet nutters, and horniness- to such epic proportions that it just about gets away with the superhero brief.

Joker projected the hopes and dreams of the incel onto screens around the world; Batman’s brief comes across more hazily, since the aims of the entitled guilty white dude seem less clear or attainable. Put it this way: a movie that takes place in a thinly-veiled version of NYC, and which opens with an attempted hate crime on an Asian subway commuter, seems a little closer to documentary than fantasy. Pattinson’s Batman swoops in to save the day, of course, along with a member of the violent gang who suffers an eleventh-hour crisis of conscience. To many viewers, though, this deus ex machina serves to hammer home the continuing real-life crisis, rather than the reassuring presence of a Kevlar-swathed PC Plod.

The Batman reaches for an ambitious fistful of real-life issues, encapsulated in the statement from half-hearted bisexual Selina Kyle/Catwoman (Zoe Kravitz) that “all anyone cares about in this place are these white privileged assholes”. The breakneck speed at which Selina forgets her brutally murdered girlfriend Anya, and succumbs to the grunts of the emotionally unavailable and visibly mayonnaise-hued Batman, gives us a strong hint as to where the true affections of the production team might lie.

A reassuring cast of familiar faces emerge to aid Bruce Wayne in his tussle with Mindhunter-esque serial killer, The Riddler (Paul Dano). Dano- doing his trademark mouth-breather shtick in a costume ripped from Melania Trump’s ‘I Really Don’t Care Jacket’, with a hint of Zoe Deschanel’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl hipster glasses- makes his clammy way through three hours of Freudian torment with the aplomb of a pantomime villain. In fairness, though, he follows in a long tradition of lords of misrule: an all-too-realistic fairground monster, in this case an internet overlord who urges disenfranchised, anonymous ‘little men’ to take up their Glocks and attack a left-leaning politician. Parallels with the ‘Q drops’, from the figurehead of QAnon behind the Capitol storming, seem hard to ignore; and yet ignore them we do, when faced with the diverting spectacle of R-Patz and Zoe Kravitz in skintight leather, elbowing their way across the Printworks balcony to the thrum of accompanying techno. This tableau- an attractive couple who appear to be coked off their faces and in the mood for a violent threesome- should be eerily realistic to anyone with experience on the London club scene.

Likewise, Andy Serkis’s take on Bruce’s butler Alfred- the sole ‘salt of the earth’ British accent in a rarefied atmosphere of grungy poshos, cartoonish Italian-American mafiosi, and camera-friendly Democratic politicos- bumbles through a dishearteningly familiar backdrop of WASPy domesticity, a sandstone riot of Oxbridge-ready Gothic windows and mahogany, easing the Nirvana-shaded angst of his young master.

Colin Farrell’s prosthetic-laden Penguin and John Turturro’s gangmaster Carmine Falcone put in an honest effort as the bad guys of this postmodern morality play: the snorting, lecherous antiheroes of a tale as old as time, where the spoilt if well-intentioned technocrat, and the hilariously credulous Police Commissioner Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), can triumph over the all-too-evident evils of the modern urban landscape. In reality, though, their closing victory is about as convincing as Batman’s decision to turn down an eyelash-fluttering Catwoman; the Twitterverse’s verdict on the ending suggests that the cartoonish moral certainty of Gotham City is still some distance away.