The Batman is Warner Bros.' latest big-screen reinvention of the iconic DC Comics hero, which depicts the Caped Crusader - and, crucially, Bruce Wayne - as a ruthless, vengeance-fuelled vigilante who has taken it upon himself to rid Gotham City of crime at any cost - even his own soul.
We find The Dark Knight (Robert Pattinson) in Year Two of his "career," spending his nights beating low-level thugs to a pulp, and his days moping around his makeshift Batcave being a bit of a dick to Alfred (Andy Serkis). When a serial killer known as the Riddler (Paul Dano) begins murdering members of Gotham's elite and leaving clues for The Batman himself, Wayne is drawn into a sinister conspiracy involving Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), his right-hand man The Penguin (Colin Farrell), and possibly even the entire GCPD. Joining forces with honest cop Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) and Iceberg Lounge waitress/cat burglar Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), Batman starts to piece together a plot that threatens to bring the criminality he's fought so hard to extinguish closer to home than he could ever have imagined.
While Ben Affleck's previous version of Batman existed in the same universe as the superheroes of the Justice League and was a lot closer to the character's comic book counterpart, writer/director Matt Reeves dials everything back for a stripped-down, standalone take that owes a lot to Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy - only this movie is even more grounded in reality. Though it does contain some outlandish elements, at its core, Reeves' film is a noirish detective story that's primarily interested in getting under our hero's skin in order to discover what drives a man to dress as a creature of the night to strike terror into criminals.
It's an intriguing approach, but it does present a slight problem.
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About The Author:
Mark Cassidy is a writer, photographer, amateur filmmaker, and Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic from Dublin, Ireland.