The Batman

Matt Reeves opens with a murder on Halloween night and spends most of the next 177 minutes on the investigation. That is the novelty. Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) is two years into the costume, narrates a journal in voiceover, and has little interest in being Bruce Wayne; the parents are dead and nobody says the word origin. When Gotham’s mayor is killed in his own home and a greeting card addressed to the Batman is left with the body, Lt. James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) walks a man in a cape onto the crime scene, and the uniformed officers stare at him as though a bear had wandered in. Reeves and his co-writer Peter Craig then let the riddles do the plotting for the better part of two hours.

It is beautifully done for a long time. Greig Fraser shoots Gotham in rain and sodium orange and keeps the Batman dark until something lights him: in one corridor the only light is gunfire, so the fight arrives as a series of flashes with a man inside them. The Batmobile is introduced as two headlamps in a garage and later comes through a wall of fire, and Fraser turns the camera over so we watch the aftermath upside down. James Chinlund’s Gotham is a wet, brown, overbuilt city of overhead rail and stained stone, and Wayne Tower a mansion nobody has dusted in years. Michael Giacchino gives the Batman a four-note theme that lands like footsteps on a stair, and the film keeps returning to Nirvana’s “Something in the Way”, which is a bit much and works anyway.

Pattinson plays Bruce as a sullen rich boy who has found a use for his misery, and he is at his best in the mask, saying little in a low, unshowy voice while the eyeliner does the rest. Wright’s Gordon is the film’s grown-up, patient and tired, and their scenes together, two men walking through evidence, are what keeps the detective idea upright. Paul Dano’s Riddler is a plastic mask and a breathing pattern for most of the film, and his video messages unsettle in a way this kind of film rarely manages. Colin Farrell, under so much prosthetic that we did not recognise him, plays Oz as a mid-level crook enjoying himself. Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle is practical and cross and the most alive person on screen. John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone never raises his voice, and is the most frightening thing in the film.

We were gripped for the first hour. The corridor fight had us leaning forward, and the first Riddler video, a man in a mask breathing at a camera, made us want to look away and not quite manage it. It has been a while since a comic-book film frightened us, and this one did, for a while.

Then it goes on. Editors Tyler Nelson and William Hoy pace the first two hours with real patience, letting clues sit, and then the last forty minutes turn into the film the first two had politely declined to be: a big set piece, a crowd, a rescue, a speech. The mystery leads somewhere smaller than its setup promised; the riddles were better than their answer. Peter Sarsgaard’s district attorney gets one strong, sweaty scene and is gone. Jayme Lawson’s Bella Reál, running for mayor, is on more posters than in scenes. By the third hour we were checking how long was left, and we resented it, because the first hour had earned better.

Against Reeves’s own work this sits with his two Planet of the Apes films (2014 and 2017): sombre, handsome, serious about a silly premise and slow. Against earlier Batman films, it is the one most interested in the detective work, and the one that owes most to David Fincher; Zodiac (2007) is all over the procedural half, and the Riddler’s home videos would not disgrace Se7en (1995). Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) had a tighter plot and a better villain to argue with. This one has a better city.

Worth your evening if you like detective stories and can sit through a long one. Watch it with the lights off and the volume up, and mind the certificate: it is a 15, the violence is mostly in the dark, and it is loud. Jacqueline Durran has made the cape look heavy and the suit look like something you could bleed in, and for two hours the film believes her. Then, like every Batman film before it, it remembers it has to blow something up.