Matt Reeves’ The Batman feels like a movie out of time, a superhero epic wonderfully bereft of fantasy elements, superpowers and magical bells and whistles. It is the kind of comic book movie that people who do not really like comic book movies can love, a sumptuously languid crime procedural that is full of orchestral, spiky splendour and Gotham City grit. A superhero flick that is so different from the likes of The Flash or Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania that it might as well be from a different film genre entirely.
And it is here perhaps that we should give credit to Warner Bros’ struggling DC regime. No matter how terrible its now-abandoned “extended universe” became over the past decade or so – and there were some pretty appalling low points – it is impossible to imagine a film like this emerging from any other studio. While Warner was overseeing a seemingly endless stream of mismatched, tonally chaotic episodes, it was also handing Reeves the keys to Gotham City and letting him run riot with an immense sense of style and panache. If The Batman isn’t the artiest superhero film ever made – how many other films in this genre take their cue elliptically from a Gus Van Sant drama about the final days of Kurt Cobain? – it is certainly making a damned good effort.
