When the title character first sheds his cape and cowl in “The Batman,” a moody, methodical and, finally, disappointing return to Gotham City, your initial glimpse of Bruce Wayne might come as a mild shock. Not because of the fine actor playing him — it’s Robert Pattinson, as if you didn’t know — but because of the heavy bruises darkening his pale face, as if he’d been wearing a mask beneath his mask. Bloody beatings are to be expected for a vigilante trawling Gotham’s lower depths by night, but these particular wounds might well have been inflicted from within. This Bruce Wayne doesn’t look like a playboy or a billionaire, let alone a hero; with his unkempt sidelocks and air of morning-after debasement, he’s more like an addict about to crash, or a young rock star gone to seed.
The director, Matt Reeves, who wrote the movie’s dense screenplay with Peter Craig, plays up these associations with an early snippet of Kurt Cobain singing “Something in the Way,” a hit of acoustic anguish that supplies one of the movie’s two recurring pieces of music. The other one — variations of which will soon seep into Michael Giacchino’s death march of a score — is “Ave Maria,” setting a funereal tone even before it pops up at an actual Gotham funeral. Murder is in the air, thanks to the Riddler (Paul Dano), a cross between Ted Kaczynski and Will Shortz who clearly has a thing for David Fincher movies, given the techniques he’s borrowed from the Zodiac Killer and the detail-oriented John Doe from “Seven.”
The deadly sins being punished here are all sins of betrayal, committed against the people of Gotham by their ostensible enforcers of law and order. The Riddler’s first victim is the city’s mayor (Rupert Penry-Jones), a high-stakes target for a story that soon strands us in a labyrinth of legal, financial and political corruption. We are in a hard-edged, rain-pelted Gotham City that, absent either Tim Burton’s gothic eccentricity or Joel Schumacher’s neon excess, suggests a Manhattan from which bright lights and warm colors have been banished. (The often oppressively murky images were shot by Greig Fraser, a current Oscar nominee for “Dune.”)
