This is definitely a move that features a man dressed as a “bat”, and there’s definitely some real good money thrown at it, but did they have to make the whole thing as boring as it ended up being? Everyone here is doing what they’ve been paid to do, but the story and story beats are all out of line with what I want from a Batman story. Add to that the orchestral soundtrack is a boring uninspired slow slog of just brooding tones that don’t result in the emotional punch that the character or this type of film really needs. Take a listen to the official “main theme” that they released before the film:
The song itself is actually pretty nice, but I can’t recall anything other than the first 30 seconds from the film, that same 30 seconds is repeated in nearly every scene, and it gets to be incredibly too noticeable by the end of the movies over bloated 3 hour run time. There’s several story lines that could have, and should have, been sacrificed to the gods of succinctness, and I’d nominate either the mobster storyline or the Catwoman storyline. With apologies to Halle Berry and Anne Hathaway, Zoe Kravitz is likely the best Catwoman we’re ever goin to get in modern times and they nearly got her story right, but unless I’m mistaken, they chose to change her origins again for reasons that only serve this one movie, and not the character on the whole.
Additionally to all that, I absolutely hated this version of the Riddler. Give me Frank Gorshin in spandex cheesing it up, or Jim Carey doing the same exact thing, just better. Don’t give him a leather gimp mask, don’t make him an explosives expert, or a sniper marksman. Why add all those things to a character that’s always been an overreaching intellectual superior to The Batman, but a physical push over? Why make him so damn grim dark?
The best Riddler story that I ever read was when he figured out the Batman / Bruce Wayne connection, but realized that he couldn’t tell anyone because then it wouldn’t be all that valuable. I was really hoping they were going to do something like that, but alas, that’s a story for a better medium.
