‘The Batman’ Review: Serial Killer Chiller Is Darkest Knight Yet – CNET [CNET]

You’ve seen a million Batman movies, but you still need to steel yourself for the darkest Dark Knight yet. Starring Robert Pattinson as DC’s Caped Crusader, 2022’s new movie The Batman is an intense, apocalyptic cinematic experience.

Following the murder of his parents (you know that bit), Bruce Wayne is two years into his crusade against Gotham City street crime. He’s formed an alliance with upstanding cop Jim Gordon, but nothing prepares them for a chillingly planned series of atrocities by a macabre masked murderer who leaves fiendish puzzles with each victim. As Batman unpicks the cryptic clues, the investigation peels away a greater conspiracy. But the real riddle is how the ranting killer’s twisted motive ties back to Batman himself.

As that synopsis suggests, The Batman (in theaters March 4) is barely a superhero movie. Director Matt Reeves, who co-wrote the script with Peter Craig, shovels previous Bat-films into one roaring blast furnace: There are notes of Tim Burton’s gothy angst, Christopher Nolan’s criminal politics and Zack Snyder’s operatic brutality, plus the standalone Joker movie‘s psychological backstory, vaguely timeless design and layers of dark irony.

But it’s also more of a detective mystery than previous Bat-flicks, borrowing in particular from David Fincher’s serial killer chillers Seven and Zodiac. And it’s a gangster movie. Also a ’70s conspiracy thriller. And a relentlessly bleak film noir. 

Most of all, though, The Batman is a horror movie. 

In 1989, pearl-clutching parents were shocked and appalled by Tim Burton’s Batman. The tights-wearing funny book hero who biffed, powed and zapped cartoon villains was replaced by a traumatized weirdo in black rubber fetish gear, trading blows with a giggling, acid-scarred psychopath. In Britain they even had to invent a new rating category for the movie.

Let’s not get into the perennial argument among fans about whether superhero movies should be for kids or for grown-ups. You absolutely 100% can’t show The Batman to a child. This new flick is PG-13, but it’s on a whole other level from the relatively bloodless Dark Knight movies — and on a different planet from any Marvel film — immersing you in a nerve-shredding three hours of escalating dread and simmering pain garnished with some astonishingly nasty touches. 

This explicitly scary Batman film opens with a sinister scene of jaw-tightening suspense, adding serial killer scares and even a few dashes of torture porn. The people of Gotham are introduced as a swirling crowd of faceless, Halloween-masked figures. Jagged horror movie strings and Michael Giacchino’s relentless score ratchet up the tension. There aren’t any baddies plundering diamonds from charity galas, but a ghoulish serial killer who plunges the city into a simmering cauldron of creeping panic. Batman himself stalks from the shadows with a heavy tread and heavier fists, meting out pitiless vengeance with a chilling lack of affect behind his mask.

Pattinson’s Batman (Battinson? Pattman?) is a lank-haired mess, a world away from Christian Bale’s slick professional or Ben Affleck’s graying grump. Hunched in the basement listening to Nirvana with mascara running down his face, this younger Bruce Wayne is unformed and yet already unraveling, muttering a Taxi Driver-esque voiceover as he drowns in a filthy tide of lawlessness and degradation. Pattinson genuinely inhabits the Batman, expressing despair with just his perfectly angled jaw and soulful eyes staring from beneath the black mask. Still, you could probably shave down the epic two hour and 47 minute runtime if there was a bit less of Batman slowly… walking… and… meaningfully… staring…

For all his formidable fighting skills and detective prowess, this Batman is barely holding it together. And that gives the film a vital charge.

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