Imagine, if you will, the pitch meeting for “The Batman,” Matt Reeves’ reboot of the Caped Crusader franchise starring Robert Pattinson. “Like ‘Joker,’” says someone at a conference table, “but more depressing.” Someone else pipes up, “We could save money on lighting by just, you know, not lighting it at all.” And another joins in, “And what if we made it really, really long?”
Behold “The Batman,” which is all of these things: depressing, dark and endless. (I think it’s about seven hours long, to be precise? But I may have blacked out toward the end.) I don’t know about you, but this particular time in history does not seem like the moment for a movie that will leave you a) miserable and b) wondering why nobody in Gotham City seems to have heard of light bulbs. Your mileage may vary, but for me — who loved both the Tim Burton and the Christopher Nolan “Batman” universes — this one feels like an earnest but bloated misfire.
Pattinson, joining the mercifully sparse brotherhood of Superheroes Who Are Too Moody to Wash Their Hair, here plays a young, eerily pale and very intense Bruce Wayne. But this is no origin story: Bruce is already Gotham’s vigilante hero, lurking in the night and swooping down in his Batsuit to wreak vengeance on criminals. And his efforts are sorely needed; this version of Gotham City is a hellhole, drenched in constant sodden downpours (seriously, and I say this as a Seattleite, that is a lot of rain), night-lit in the grim brownish-yellow of tobacco stains, filled with roaming criminals who’ve taken makeup lessons from the Joker. (I kid. Somebody has to.)
