Just when you’ve had it with Gotham City, caped crusaders and the whole murked-up franchise, along comes a good Batman movie — easily the best since “The Dark Knight” 14 years and an entire film industry ago.
“The Batman” keeps the lights low and the dread high, as well as makes it rainy enough to earn the forecast “cloudy with a chance of ‘Blade Runner.’” It runs a tick under three hours. Some will respond to that news with: woof. Many may find those hours a tough, deliberately paced night in movie jail, and (no surprise to the ardent fan base) the opposite of exuberant escapism.
But across several highly variable directors now, the pointy-eared DC Comics gold mine has pushed and stretched and drilled down into the rough stuff for its two-faced, psychologically riven protagonists and antagonists. It got pretty awful for the audience, too, for a while, with the Zack Snyder Batman movies.
