Matt Reeves’ The Batman, released in 2022, opens on Halloween, and the holiday is not decoration. A masked killer murders Gotham City mayor Don Mitchell Jr. in his own home, leaves a message for Batman at the scene, and kills again the next night. Reeves directs a serial-killer mystery wearing a cape, and the cape is the least interesting thing about it.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Paul Dano’s Riddler Works in Paperwork
Paul Dano plays the Riddler as a terrorist targeting the city’s elite, and his method is documentation. He plants a thumb drive in Mitchell’s car holding images of the mayor’s affair with Annika Kosolov at the Iceberg Lounge, the nightclub run by the Penguin as a lieutenant to crime boss Carmine Falcone. He abducts district attorney Gil Colson, straps a timed collar bomb to his neck, and sends him to interrupt Mitchell’s funeral.
The best sequence in The Batman is that funeral. The Riddler calls Batman on a phone duct-taped to Colson and threatens to detonate the bomb unless Colson answers three riddles. Colson refuses the third — the name of the informant behind a historic drug bust that ended mob boss Salvatore Maroni’s operation — and dies.
A riddle is only frightening when the answer costs something.
Pattinson Plays an Insomniac
Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is around 30, two years into the vigilante work, and not yet good at it. Reeves wanted the character before he becomes experienced, and Pattinson plays him as an insomniac who cannot separate the Batman persona from his “recluse rockstar” public identity. Reeves has compared the obsession to drug addiction.
That framing does real work. This Batman is more flawed than the traditional superhero, unable to control himself, processing rage and inflicting what he perceives as justice. Reeves has said the film is a story about Batman learning he must not exact vengeance but inspire hope. The gap between those two things is the whole movie.
Selina Kyle Is the One Who Moves
Zoë Kravitz plays Selina Kyle as a nightclub waitress, drug dealer and cat burglar searching for her missing roommate Annika. Her moral ambiguity challenges Batman’s black-and-white view of good and evil, and Kravitz has described the pair as partners in crime drawn together by a desire to fight for vulnerable people.
Kravitz focused more on Selina than on the Catwoman persona, and that choice pays off. She is the character who changes. Reeves has said Selina lets Batman see his sheltered upbringing and revise his assumptions about Gotham’s corruption. When Selina discovers Annika’s corpse in the trunk of a car, the film stops being a puzzle and becomes something with a cost.
The Rot Reaches Wayne Manor
Batman and Lieutenant Jim Gordon — Jeffrey Wright, steady and unshowy — work the case against the disdain of the Gotham City Police Department. They learn that Savage and Mitchell were on Falcone’s payroll, and so is Colson. They track the Penguin to a drug deal and find that Maroni’s operation was transferred to Falcone, with many corrupt officers involved.
Then the story does the thing that separates The Batman from its predecessors: the corruption connects to Bruce’s own family. That is the promise of the premise, and it is where the film’s ambition and its 177-minute runtime start arguing with each other.
Three Batmen, Three Different Jobs
| Version | Batman’s experience | Story focus | Villain’s method |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ben Affleck’s version | Established, tied to a wider franchise | Crossover spectacle | Physical threat |
| Pattinson’s version | Second year, around 30, not yet experienced | Detective work and family corruption | Riddles, notes, bombs |
| Reeves’ stated inspirations | “Year One,” The Long Halloween, Ego | Detective aspects of Batman | Serial-killer procedure |
Reeves took over the project in February 2017 after Ben Affleck stepped down that January, and reworked the story to cut the connections to the DC Extended Universe. Affleck had signed on to direct, produce and co-write by 2016 but had reservations about the project. The film that survived that turnover is smaller and stranger than the one announced in October 2014.
What the Detective Story Delivers
Reeves wrote the screenplay with Peter Craig and Mattson Tomlin, and drew on Alfred Hitchcock, the New Hollywood era, and the comics “Year One,” The Long Halloween and Ego. The influence shows in the procedure: Batman and Gordon deduce, track, and get things wrong.
The Riddler’s funeral set piece is the film’s cleanest construction. The middle is less clean. At 177 minutes, The Batman carries sequences that exist to establish mood and end up establishing only length. Colin Farrell’s Penguin is a live wire buried under prosthetics, and John Turturro’s Falcone is quietly the most frightening person on screen, but neither gets enough room to become more than a piece of the machine.
The Batman is a good film with a great first act and a long tail. Its central bet — that Pattinson’s inexperienced, self-destructive Batman is more interesting than an accomplished one — pays off, and making the corruption personal gives the mystery a floor to stand on.
What it does not solve is the problem that has dogged every serious Batman adaptation: the villain’s plan is more legible than the hero’s interior life, and the film keeps reaching for the second while the first does the work. Dano is the strongest argument the movie makes for itself, and also the strongest argument against its length. Every time he appears, the film tightens. Every time he does not, it drifts.
The Batman is worth the ticket. It is not yet the definitive version of the character, and it knows it — that is the point of setting it in year two. 7.2 of 10.
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