Batman then fakes his death, destroying Bruce Wayne and his empire overnight, going underground to continue his fight from the shadows. The Riddler is obsessed above all with what he says is the most grotesquely crooked thing about Gotham City: the plutocrat Wayne family and Bruce’s late father who made fraud and crime the city’s foundation stone. Superman, who is already in a weakened state because of the nuclear missile aftermath and lack of sunlight, takes a severe beating from Batman. So our antihero effectively joins forces with commissioner Gordon (Wright, lending his innate dignity and integrity to the role) to take down the Riddler, incidentally putting himself up against mob boss Carmine Falcone (Turturro) and his bloated sidekick Oswald “The Penguin” Cobblepot ( Colin Farrell) who don’t like questions being asked about who is doing the corrupting.īut wait. He sets out to whack the corrupt Gotham establishment one by one, including Mayor Don Mitchell (Rupert Penry-Jones) and district attorney Gil Colson ( Peter Sarsgaard), leaving quibbling questions for the Batman on Hallmark-type cards at the scene of each gruesome crime. Most exercised about this is the Riddler (Paul Dano), sporting a rubber gimp mask for his many social media appearances. But the city is still drenched in crime and addiction to a new narcotic called “drops”, to which law enforcement is clearly turning a blind eye. Gotham City’s political classes are complacently congratulating themselves on rooting out a major drug dealer, Sal Maroni. Joining forces … Robert Pattinson and Jeffrey Wright in The Batman. And this of course is happening in the sepulchral vastness of Gotham City, the brutal and murky world which Christopher Nolan thrillingly pioneered with his Dark Knight trilogy and made indispensable for imagining Batman on screen. You can imagine some growly voice saying “the Batman” – but not Tom Holland putting on a deep baritone to say he’s “the Spider-Man”, or Henry Cavill booming he’s “the Superman” (although maybe you could have Billy Joel stride into a dark Gotham City bar to raspingly confront “the Piano Man”).ĭirector and co-writer Matt Reeves has created a new Batman iteration in which Robert Pattinson reinvents billionaire Bruce Wayne as an elegantly wasted rock star recluse, willowy and dandyish in his black suit with tendrils of dark hair falling over his face but Wayne magically trebles in bulk when he reappears in costume and mask as the Dark Knight, his whole being weaponised into a slab-like impassivity. Adding “the” to Batman’s name has become a huge part of the brand identity, a sign of how elemental and atavistic this shadowy figure is supposed to be. T hat definite article means it’s the genuine article.
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