The Batman — Robert Pattinson’s grungy avenger is more sleuth than superhero

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Gotham City, love it or leave it. Or just sweep up after the last occupant and make another movie. Naturally, Warner Bros and the creative forces behind The Batman take the third option with their efficient, supersized new blockbuster, the latest reboot of Hollywood’s hardest-working intellectual property. At this point, reinvention is relative. Gotham still crawls with villainy. The sun assuredly does not have his hat on. The novelty is a minor adjustment of tone, the movie given the noirish trappings of a crime thriller. And when a pack of goons ask the silhouette in the cape, “Who the hell are you supposed to be?” the answer too is new. Why, that’s Robert Pattinson.

For the star, the costume has been a long time coming. After the Twilight franchise ended a decade ago, Pattinson spent a palate-cleansing spell in indie films. Now he steps back into the maw of mainstream pop culture. Never less than charismatic, his performance also has a glassy affect that might speak to his unease — or that of the character.

Robert Pattison as billionaire Bruce Wayne

As the film begins, billionaire vigilante Bruce Wayne is plagued by self-doubt. Pattinson is 35, but his Wayne has a nagging sense of the teenage. Specifically, a teenager in the early 1990s. Out of the Bat-suit, with Nirvana playing on the soundtrack, his pallor and scarecrow hair suggest the bass player in a minor grunge band. Inside it, he looms at a crime scene to the derision of city cops.

That crime is murder most gruesome. Director Matt Reeves puts us one step ahead by showing us the act: a political hopeful brutally offed by a nightmarish figure in another mask. A code is left behind; one might say a riddle. It is only the start. Throughout the film, this Batman is more sleuth than a superhero.

The underworld festers in techno clubland; Colin Farrell does a passable Penguin, buried under prosthesis. We also encounter feline tough-nut Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz). “You got a lot of cats,” Pattinson deadpans. (From time to time, the film is not un-droll.) With bodies stacking up, the usual stuff of childhood trauma comes wrapped in old-school talk of stool pigeons. A citywide conspiracy takes shape. “It’s so much bigger than you could imagine,” our boy is told. Forget it, Batman, it’s Chinatown.

Colin Farrell is among the stars in the franchise reboot © Jonathan Olley

But not as much as it is Seven. The longer the film plays, the more it lifts from David Fincher’s 1995 horror-thriller. The rain pours and night is endless amid baroque killings, booby-trapped victims and diaries filled with cramped, handwritten misanthropy. The homage feels like policy. This Batman follows not just other Batmen but, more pertinently still, Joker, the smirky hot potato that grossed $1bn in 2019. That movie used a mash-up of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy like a greenscreen backdrop. Now another classic is recycled for an audience presumed not to be au fait. Riddle me this: how far will Fincher’s eyebrows raise when he sees The Batman?

Still, not everything is karaoke. Reeves (Cloverfield) is an able talent with a confident touch. If the film can feel every bit as long as its three-hour running time, the director keeps the show going with grand, all-you-can-eat enthusiasm. He is too much of a Spielbergian crowd-pleaser not to pack some dazzles for the journey. A gunfight in a pitch-black room is lit with comic-book sparks from the bullets. As Pattinson careers through Gotham, the camera jitters with GoPro energy. An endless swarm of furious cops has the gleeful invention of silent cinema.

Paul Dano is a nightmarish masked figure in ‘The Batman’

The film does OK with limited options. Over the course of the actual 1990s, its hero fell into campy irrelevance. The response was the trilogy of Christopher Nolan movies that ended with The Dark Knight Rises, giving superheroes new kudos while still cranking up the box office. That double whammy made the formula untouchable: vaguely dire intimations about America, a tone summed up by the tiny plastic Batman of 2014’s The Lego Movie: “Darkness! Brooding! Important!”

Nolan’s legacy still can’t be shaken off. But the tweaks are something. For one, they give Batman back his libido: Pattinson and Kravitz have bona fide chemistry. Even bolder might be a franchise movie made in the age of fandom which signals that the world may not be improved by the online voices of the over-invested. “Hey guys, thanks for all the comments!” the murderer beams through his webcam — the movie making a small but laudable act of tempting fate.

★★★☆☆

In UK and US cinemas from March 4

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