THE BATMAN (Film Review)

There was a moment during The Batman in which it became clear the film was a great piece of cinema. Following an attack that almost kills him, Batman is cornered by aggressive police officers looking to blame him for the Riddler’s reign of terror before he is assisted in an escape in which he rappels up through Gotham PD headquarters, crashing through to the roof before he abseils down into the murky city below. In and of itself, this could be a sequence from any Batman film since 1989 but it was the point where it dawned on me just how well Matt Reeves’ latest take on the Caped Crusader was working. <img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:404/0*iWh_EdnHXvgmQmWh" style="height:206px; width:404px" /> Because, let’s be honest, everything was stacked against this. DC Comics, one or two outliers aside, have had a torrid time of it in cinematic terms since the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s towering Dark Knight trilogy a decade ago. Ben Affleck essayed a fine Bruce Wayne across two (and a bit) dreadful Zach Snyder-led movies but Batman remained in the shadow of Nolan’s modernistic take on Gotham’s corruption and Bruce’s tragic heroic myth that felt, in many respects, quite definitive. There are always fresh avenues to take with a hero who has frequently reinvented himself but where could you go after those films and it have the same scale and impact was the burning question. Snyder’s answer was bigger, louder and universal. Reeves provides a more satisfying response with The Batman by far. <a href="https://medium.com/@ajblackwriter/the-batman-film-review-b7c50c393302">Read More</a>