- UK release: March 2022
- Director: Matt Reeves · Writers: Matt Reeves, Peter Craig
- Studio / distributor: Warner Bros.; DC Films
- Genre: Neo-noir superhero detective thriller · Runtime: 176 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Robert Pattinson (Tenet, Good Time) as Bruce Wayne / Batman; Zoë Kravitz (Mad Max: Fury Road) as Selina Kyle; Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood, Prisoners) as Edward Nashton; Jeffrey Wright (Westworld) as Lieutenant James Gordon
- Rotten Tomatoes: 85% critics / 87% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
We have had a lot of Batmen. Burton’s gothic pantomime, Schumacher’s neon disaster, Nolan’s grounded trilogy that more or less rewrote what a superhero film could be. The reasonable question hanging over Matt Reeves arriving with yet another one, barely a decade after The Dark Knight Rises, is what on earth there is left to say. Reeves answers it by quietly ignoring most of what we expect from the character. There is no origin story, no murdered parents in an alley, no playboy charm. He has taken the oldest and least-used part of the mythology, the line about the world’s greatest detective, and built a three-hour rain-soaked crime film around it.
The setup
It is Bruce Wayne’s second year prowling Gotham, and the city has not noticed any improvement. He is still a bruised, sleepless figure who beats people in subways and writes in a journal, less a symbol of hope than a rumour the criminals trade nervously among themselves. Then a killer calling himself the Riddler (Paul Dano) starts murdering Gotham’s powerful, leaving taunting ciphers addressed personally to the Batman at each scene. Working alongside the one honest cop in the building, Lieutenant Gordon (Jeffrey Wright), and crossing paths with a cat burglar named Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz) who has her own reasons for prowling the same rooftops, Bruce follows the puzzles into the city’s rotten foundations, and finds the corruption runs closer to home than he would like.
The cast
Robert Pattinson is the gamble that pays off. He plays Bruce as a recessive, almost feral presence, all smudged eyeliner and downward stares, more interested in evidence than in being liked. It is a brave reading of a part that usually trades on charisma, and it works because Pattinson commits to the strangeness rather than apologising for it. Zoë Kravitz gives Selina real weight and hurt, and the chemistry between them is the closest the film comes to warmth. Jeffrey Wright is excellent as Gordon, grounding the whole thing in tired procedural decency. And Paul Dano, who has been playing unsettling for years, makes the Riddler genuinely frightening, a furious nobody radicalised by his own grievances. Colin Farrell, buried under prosthetics as a wheedling Penguin, is so unrecognisable he deserves a credit of his own.
The craft
Greig Fraser shoots Gotham as a permanently nocturnal, sodium-lit hell, all reflections in wet asphalt and headlights cutting through rain, and it is one of the best-looking blockbusters in years. Reeves stages the detective work with patience, letting scenes breathe in a way superhero films almost never dare, and when the action does land it has real impact: a corridor lit only by muzzle flashes, a car chase that ends with the Batmobile emerging from a wall of fire. Michael Giacchino’s score is a brooding four-note dirge that worms into your head and earns comparison with Nolan-era Zimmer. It is long, no question, and the back third tests your patience. But the atmosphere is so total that the running time feels less like padding than immersion.
How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is not another Batman film but David Fincher. This is Se7en and Zodiac in a cowl: the same fascination with patient investigation, serial-killer dread, and a city sick to its bones. The comic faithful will spot the bones of Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One and the Jeph Loeb Long Halloween run, and the noir lineage reaches all the way back to Chinatown, where the detective discovers the conspiracy is bigger and dirtier than the case he started with. Against the Nolan films, Reeves trades that trilogy’s clockwork plotting and grand themes for mood and texture. It is less interested in arguing about chaos and order than in soaking you in a single oppressive place.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm, sitting around 85%, with audiences a touch higher at 87%, and for once they are roughly in agreement. The praise lands on Fraser’s photography, the detective framing and Pattinson, while the recurring complaint is the length and the unrelenting grimness. Both are fair. This is a film with no jokes and very little daylight, and three hours of it is a commitment. But the gloom is the texture, not a flaw to be sanded off, and anyone hoping for the wisecracking quip-machine of the team-up films was always going to bounce off it.
Verdict
This is the Batman film I did not know I wanted: slow, soaked, and confident enough to make a superhero spend most of his screen time reading clues. It rewards attention, it looks extraordinary, and the atmosphere is the kind I will happily sink back into, which for me counts for a great deal. It overstays its welcome slightly, and the relentless misery will not be for everyone. But on craft, mood and sheer rewatchable texture it lands well above the average blockbuster, and a notch above where I expected it to. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now, in IMAX where you can get to a screen. A streaming home on the Warner platforms and a disc release will follow in the coming months.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: The Batman did strong enough business to anchor a planned franchise, with Reeves and Pattinson signed for a sequel, The Batman Part II, and a Gotham-set spin-off series (The Penguin, with Colin Farrell reprising the role) developed for streaming. The film has settled into its reputation as one of the better stand-alone superhero pictures of its era, admired for its detective focus and cinematography even by those who find it overlong. It now streams on the Warner platform (HBO Max / Max, by region) and is widely available on 4K disc and digital.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for strong threat, violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: Scenes include shootings, fistfights, electrocutions, and sequences in which people are repeatedly punched or bludgeoned. There is occasional sight of blood and injury detail. Mutilated bodies are found at crime scenes, and there is sight of a severed thumb.
Threat and horror: Scenes include people in states of terror and distress after being placed in elaborate death traps. The tone is frequently dark and menacing, and includes scenes of gun threat and acts of terrorism.
Language: There is infrequent strong language (‘f**k’) as well as milder terms including ‘prick’, ‘dick’, ‘fricking’, ‘bastard’, ‘son of a bitch’, ‘shit’, ‘God’, ‘hell’, ‘Jesus’, and ‘Christ’.
Sex: There are moderate sex references, and a sequence in which a man watches a woman changing her clothes through her window.
Drugs: People are seen administering an unnamed illegal drug.
Suicide and self-harm: References are made to suicide and mental health.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
