Best Gotham Evah…
The Batman (2022): 9 out of 10: There was a time when every new Batman movie arrived carrying the weight of not just fan expectations, but an entire cultural argument. Is this one too dark? Too comic-booky? Too grounded? Too operatic? Too eager to comment on the modern world? The Batman, Matt Reeves’ brooding, rain-soaked take on the Caped Crusader, walks into all of that baggage and somehow emerges better than any Batman film outside of The Dark Knight.
And yes, let’s get this out of the way right now: Robert Pattinson is excellent. The man understood the assignment.
This is a beautifully made film, one with a tremendous eye for mood, texture, and physical space. It gives us a Gotham that feels less like a backdrop and more like a living, rotting organism. It also gives us a Batman who is still early in his career, still obsessive, still half-consumed by the job, and not yet especially good at being Bruce Wayne.
That last point has drawn some criticism, but here it feels less like a flaw and more like an intentional character choice. This Bruce Wayne is a man two years into a mission and nowhere near balanced enough to play billionaire playboy in public. He hasn’t developed the mask behind the mask yet.
The result is one of the best Batman movies ever made. Not quite The Dark Knight good, few movies are, but close enough that in its strongest moments, you can feel it breathing down that film’s neck.
The Good
Let’s begin with Gotham, because The Batman may simply have the best Gotham ever put on screen.
The film’s use of real locations, including Scottish architecture and cityscapes, creates a Gotham that feels huge, diseased, haunted, and alive. This is not a generic CGI metropolis. This is a city with grime under its fingernails. It looms over the entire movie like a cursed cathedral. In many ways, Gotham becomes the film’s most dynamic character, which is exactly as it should be in a Batman story.
Matt Reeves understands something a lot of filmmakers miss: Gotham should not just be where Batman works. Gotham should feel like the reason Batman exists. The Batman also borrows heavily from Gotham by Gaslight for both costumes and Gotham itself to great effect.
The filmmaking overall is brilliant. This is a stunningly shot movie, drenched in shadows, orange streetlight, rainwater, and bad intentions. Reeves and cinematographer Greig Fraser create images that stick in your head. Even when the movie threatens to sprawl, it remains compelling on a shot-by-shot basis. There is real directorial confidence here, the kind that can make a man forgive an awful lot.
And then there is Pattinson.
He is terrific as this younger, rougher Batman. What is especially impressive is how committed he is to the idea that Batman is not yet a polished legend. He is still figuring it out. Still angry. Still weird. Still so deep into the mission that Bruce Wayne has become little more than a neglected side hustle. That is not only an interesting choice, it is a smart one. We all know what people look like in the first couple of years of a new obsession, whether it is a job, a hobby, or vigilantism. Pattinson plays Batman like a man who has not yet learned moderation, and that works beautifully.
The supporting cast is equally strong. Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman is better than expected, sly and grounded without feeling like she wandered in from another movie. Colin Farrell’s Penguin, buried under mountains of makeup and sounding like a Brooklyn landlord, is an absolute delight. Everyone is cast well. Everyone understands the tone. No one seems to be performing in the wrong film.
The music is also pitch-perfect. The use of Nirvana is exactly the sort of choice that could have felt unbearably self-conscious in a weaker movie, but here it lands beautifully. The soundtrack and score help reinforce the film’s melancholy, half-decaying emotional world. This is a Batman movie that knows how it wants to feel from frame one, and it commits.
Best of all, the film largely resists the now-exhausting temptation to turn everything into an extended trailer for a cinematic universe. Batman works best when he is grounded, or at least grounded enough that the city and the crime feel real. As much affection as some of us may have for Batman and the Outsiders, there is a reason Batman generally plays better in alleyways than on a satellite with Superman, Wonder Woman, Hawkman, a pair of super-kids, and a purple monkey.
The Bad
Now for the part where I complain, because no matter how good The Batman is, it absolutely confirms one of my least favorite modern blockbuster trends: this thing is too long.
What we have here is, in essence, a very good two- to two-and-a-half-hour movie stretched into a three-hour runtime. That is not the same thing as saying it is boring, because it is not. In fact, one of the movie’s great achievements is that I made it through the entire thing in one sitting without constantly checking my watch or debating whether to finish it later. That alone puts it ahead of some other recent action epics I could name. Looking in your direction, John Wick: Chapter 3.
Still, the length is a problem. Or at least a drag coefficient.
There is a tighter, meaner version of this film that probably hits even harder. Some of the narrative machinery in the final stretch feels less like organic escalation and more like the movie refusing to admit it has already made its point. The story earns a lot of its gloom and grandeur, but it indulges itself, too.
That same indulgence shows up in the Bruce Wayne material, though here I am more sympathetic. This is not a very good Bruce Wayne movie, at least not in the traditional sense. If you want the charm, social camouflage, and strategic public performance that make Bruce Wayne an essential counterweight to Batman, you will not get much of it here. Personally, I think that choice works for this version of the character, but it still means one side of the classic Batman/Bruce Wayne duality is underdeveloped.
So yes, I understand the complaint, even if I do not fully agree with it.
The Ugly
My biggest issue with The Batman is the ending, or more specifically, the way the ending reaches for contemporary relevance in a manner that feels a little too self-conscious and a little too temporary.
Without getting bogged down in spoilers, the film starts taking pages from both Joker and The Dark Knight Rises, attempting to tap into a very specific social and political anxiety. The problem is that the zeitgeist it is trying to bottle already feels slippery, half-formed, and likely to date the movie in a few years. Instead of feeling timelessly mythic, the final stretch occasionally feels like it wants credit for being plugged into the discourse.
That would be easier to forgive if the climax were also the film’s most efficient storytelling, but it is not. There are character beats in the ending that I genuinely liked, and I understand what Reeves was aiming for. But the action sequence the film builds toward feels like an unnecessarily bulky delivery system for moments that probably could have landed just as well, or better, in a leaner form.
It is not a disastrous ending. It is not even a bad one. It is simply the one part of the movie where I became most aware of the machinery grinding away underneath the cape and cowl.
In Conclusion
The Batman is an excellent Batman movie, a visually gorgeous and often absorbing descent into a Gotham City that finally feels worthy of the character. It features a superb lead performance from Robert Pattinson, terrific supporting work across the board, a top-tier Penguin, a surprisingly strong Catwoman, and perhaps the best cinematic Gotham we have ever seen.
Its only real sin is a familiar one: it mistakes “more” for “better” often enough to keep it from true greatness. The movie is too long, a bit overfond of its own mood, and not entirely successful in the way it tries to channel modern unrest into its climax. But even with those flaws, it comes awfully close to greatness.
The Batman ranks above every Nolan Batman film except the obvious masterpiece, The Dark Knight, and that is lofty company. While it does not quite reach that level, but not many films do.
For long stretches, The Batman feels like the movie people had been promising us for years whenever they said, “No, this time they’re really going to get Batman right.”
For once, they did.
