By: Alex Tilton

If you’re in a long-term relationship then you understand the feeling of danger that comes when you hear the following sentence from your person; “Can you find us a movie to watch?”. This is relationship codespeak for ‘I want this movie to be your choice in case it sucks, but also I’m going to veto any suggestions you make that don’t sound good to me.’

In fairness to my wife, she also says this out loud. And this is how we ended up watching The Batman, from 2022. Something I’d been avoiding on the assumption that either it would A) just flat-out suck, or B) be the same thing I’ve seen ten times already and therefore bore me to death. 

The answer ended up being C) something different and original and cool that doesn’t realize when it should end, overstays its welcome and bores me to death.

The Batman turns out to be a serial killer mystery movie focused around a fresh, interesting new version of the Riddler. And I really liked it. It did its own thing, and it did it very well. But it did this for way, way, waaayyy too long. The Batman is a three-hour movie.

And I’m not going to beat myself up for not checking the running time first because who the hell makes a three-hour Batman movie? I thought the acting and the atmosphere were good. And I liked the fact that this is not an origin story. Batman is an established thing already when the movie starts. A quick voiceover takes care of that, and we move on.

The movie is also the most reality-grounded Batman film I’ve ever seen. Even more than the Dark Knight trilogy. The Batmobile is a tricked-out hotrod with some armor plating, not some exotic fantasy tank. Batman uses a squirrel suit to traverse the city. I doubt it would work that well in reality but it’s not blatant science fiction either. Batman is allowed into crime scenes by Gordon, but the other cops really hate this. So instead of operating completely behind the scenes, he’s an acknowledged player, but reality doesn’t conveniently blink at this either. It’s recognized as an oddity. And nobody calls Catwoman ‘Catwoman’, which is excellent, because this movie is way too grounded for that name to be taken seriously. The name ‘Batman’ gets a pass on this point, out of necessity.

Her relationship with Batman is well developed and believable. He’s interested in stopping a big conspiracy, she just wants to find her friend that got disappeared by the Mafia. The conspiracy that our heroes are investigating is clearly explained to the audience and you don’t have trouble following it. The conclusion to that story is reasonably satisfying and well presented.

The problem is that once that story ends the move tacks on an aggressively unnecessary ‘the city is going to be destroyed!’ plot and keeps going for another forty-five agonizingly boring minutes. By the time we finally got to the big set-piece ending my wife and I had both been openly asking each other ‘When is this going to end?’ They took a perfectly good small-focus story…and then kept the audience prisoner for the ‘obligatory’ city-threatening disaster sequence. But I give them credit for doing something I assumed was impossible. They made a sequence where the heroes race to save the city from being bombed horribly boring.

But if you liked it more than I did the sequel is due out in 2026. You’ll have to tell me all about it though, because I won’t be there.

Image Source: IMDb.com