Review: "The Batman" Is Very Much A Rat With Wings

It sure does fly, but "The Batman" is more posing than poetry.

May 30, 2022

In 1992, in the town of Seaford, East Sussex in southern England, 17-year-old Michael Olowokandi picked up a basketball for the first time.

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Three years later, he went to the library of his English university and grabbed Peterson’s Guide to American Colleges and Universities. He opened the book to the University of Pacific. He called the college and spoke with UOP’s assistant basketball coach Tony Marcopolous. Olowokandi told him he was 7’1”, 265 pounds, and wanted to play for the Tigers. In an era where big men ruled the game, Marcopolous felt he had received a Godsend that seemed too good to be true.

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Olowokandi excelled at Pacific, leading the Tigers to the NCAA tournament his junior year and getting named the Big West Conference Player of the Year for his senior campaign: he averaged 22 points, 11 rebounds, and three blocks per game.

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Heading into the 1998 NBA Draft, the Los Angeles Clippers had amassed just five winning seasons in their 28-year history. They finished the season 17-65, good for the third-worst record in the league, and won the lottery to "earn" the first pick in the draft. The GM, 11x All-Star and NBA legend Elgin Baylor, represented the league’s old guard: a collection of incompetent executives who exercised unshakeable devotion to antiquated analysis and roster construction. They came from a time where all that mattered was “who had the dog in them,” or whatever pseudo-macho adage could justify caring more about showmanship and aggression than efficiency and fundamentals.

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Baylor’s tenure as Clippers GM was so troubled that sports media deterred criticism towards a league icon by labeling him a “veteran of the lottery process.” He was the type to salivate at the sight of Olowokandi’s massive frame and sprawling wingspan and insist on drafting him, even if he could not pronounce his name.

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It is unfair to criticize Baylor for his decision to draft Olowokandi without contextualization. Size mattered in the late 90s, and with the Chicago Bulls dynasty at an end, the NBA scrambled to piece together contenders to steal championships in their wake. With David Robinson and Hakeem Olajuwon nearing the end of their primes, the Clippers could snag the next superstar big man to power them to the top of the Western Conference. Everything looked promising, but if you’re going to rely on paper, you must learn to read between the lines.

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Removed from a situation where his size was daunting and his ability to dominate on its will alone unconquerable, Olowokandi’s basketball deficiencies and true colors quickly surfaced. The Clippers, throwing every available resource at their number one pick, hired Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the league’s all-time leading scorer and a 6-time NBA champion, to tutor the young power forward. Unfortunately, Olowokandi did not want to get coached: not by Jabbar… not by anyone.

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Every acknowledgment of fault was a personal slight. Every mention of wrongdoing was a public embarrassment. Olowokandi ensured Abdul-Jabbar knew that he would not tolerate criticism of any kind; this also meant he would not tolerate improving his craft.

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Olowokandi never lived up to his potential, wherever it could have taken him. He did not become a double-double king but accrued countless “triple-singles.” The abilities in which he felt so confident led to a career .435 FG%, a shocking figure for a big man. It took him 38 minutes per game to reach a career-high for rebounding, and he was out of the league after ten disappointing, unproductive seasons. He is the poster child of wasted potential, the king of refusing to recognize your limitations, the elected representative of the “Ooo so close” district, and the incumbent ruler of the island for those who chose wrong.

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He is… The Batman.

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Basketball fans will also recognize Stephon Marbury, equipped with constant flash but little substance and a meltdown that torpedoed the end of his career. He, too, was The Batman. Baseball fans will recall Albert Pujols, whose greatness destined him for the Mount Rushmore of America’s pastime before a seeming disinterest in excellence and a barrage of injuries forced him into being the game’s least valuable starter. He, too, is The Batman.

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It's unfortunate that The Batman can get equated to an iconic NBA draft bust, a player whose star shines through the rose-tinted but dims in the face of reality, and a sports icon that has spent just as much time lighting up a diamond as torturing the crowd by forcing them to watch him take to it. It is a movie of unlimited potential, fantastic ideas, thrilling highs, crippling lows, and a reminder of everything it could have been, briefly was, and failed to become all in the same breath.

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Much like a streaky shooter in love with his shot, The Batman relies on the “shooters shoot” adage to justify trying to increase its percentages. A score with screeching strings, plucked straight out of an early James Bond flick and laced with a Chinatown mystique, entices in small doses but feels desperate the more the film leans on it. The orange lights from the seedy Gotham streets creep through the windows, breaking the shadows enough to make out lustful looks and brooding gazes. Regardless of timing or success rate, it forces every element, finishing with the stat line of any shooter dependent on hot streaks to succeed: it thrives just as often as it fails, and those successes feel just as rewarding as the failures feel discouraging.

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Its self-belief earns that which would ordinarily require an unreasonable suspension of disbelief. It spares us the walk-throughs of suit and vehicle upgrades to narrow its focus on intellect. Batman is not a plain hero to offset the seediness of the world he protects. The tragedies are not empty because the man himself is only an idea. The Dark Knight asked us to care about the fate of Rachel and Batman’s subsequent heartache based on the concept of a man loving a woman, but The Batman recognizes the need to imbue that man with something more than just a body and a voice. He needs to have the mind to solve riddles and decode ciphers. He needs to be self-reliant without feeling self-contained, even if he devotes his emotional efforts to locking everything inside.

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The Batman makes an unfortunate choice by bookending itself with the adolescent "edge" of Nirvana and pseudo-intellectual musing about the protagonist’s role in the universe. It is familiar (and barren) territory. It offers nothing new because it cannot, which is the problem. Deep within The Batman is a film that can weave the eerie mystique of noir into a cheeky buddy cop crime thriller. After Commissioner Gordon clears the interrogation room to help Batman escape, he hams up the visual cues to convince his colleagues he’s putting the caped crusader in his place. This moment could be just as humorous as dramatic, as intense as light-hearted, all while furthering the narrative and establishing symbiosis between two key characters. Unfortunately, The Batman is too fond of itself (and in ways that don’t always pay dividends) to see it.

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Between the brooding is a movie that balances the feeling of a comic book universe and a real-world mystery, though only in concept. It reduces the limp commentary in favor of a straightforward attempt at forcing Batman to be something instead of think, talk, or pontificate about being something. It asks its supporting cast to be slightly more than window dressing that drops a wisdom bomb from time to time.

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Do we cringe as Selina drops a contrived attack on white male privilege? Yes. Do we wish the film had been as balanced in its approach to the Dark Knight as the Riddler, whose motivations get reduced to hating everyone and defying authority because life is unfair? Yes. But in some ways, The Batman reinvents the superhero wheel. It retains the edgier tone, darker visuals, and bleak perspective, but it also strips the 90s films of their camp while fine-tuning some of the self-seriousness of the Nolan trilogy. We cannot ignore the verbal neon that relays the relationship between fear and criminality. We cannot unhear the smugness of analogizing scars with fortitude. We cannot pretend that the film draws on so many conflicting inspirations that it struggles to forge an identity of its own, even if its many concepts feel unique in application.

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But we can never forget the image of a vigilante slowly emerging from a blistering inferno to capture a wanted criminal. We cannot ignore the curiosity the film inspires by layering its overarching murder mystery with the atmosphere to earn each step in unraveling it, even if the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We cannot shake the feeling of validation as we see a superhero get genuinely challenged, even if the path to victory is too narrow to feel satisfying.

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Despite its faults, The Batman is an inventive take on a genre that feels stuck in eras defined by superficiality, whether it's campy visuals and corny dialogue or a brooding emo spin on the plight of vigilantism. It wants to be a gritty noir, a crime thriller that only laces itself with the toll of dual identities instead of defining itself by it. It wants to be a stripped-down version of yesteryear, using hints of neon and slivers of orange light to create a comic book aura without sacrificing the realism it seeks. It succeeds when turning the Batmobile into a suped-up muscle car and utilizing traffic to construct action but fails when exploiting its score too often to have the desired effect. It succeeds when laying the foundation for a complex murder mystery, arming Batman with the wits to riddle out the game of a crazed killer, but fails by refusing to challenge its characters (or its audience) with clues beyond the intellect of a fifth-grade easter egg hunt.

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It renders the conclusion, that of a half-assed plan to flood Gotham that ultimately does little but ruin some handbags and lift a few Subarus, almost moot. The Riddler relieves our protagonist of responsibility by allowing himself to get caught. His devoted band of followers get plucked straight from left field; they are a group of like-minded anarchists who somehow got kept at bay until the film realizes it cannot carry out its plan with the mastermind behind bars. The film cannot reconcile Batman's necessity with the suspension of disbelief required to believe a city run by the G-League Goodfellas (and whose minority population is nonexistent save a gang of Latino thugs) would ever elect a Black woman mayor. The Batman sells us its ideas by establishing their foundations well. It does not convince us of its intentions or integrity when it asks us to ignore its shortcomings.

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All the ingredients are present. It has the nerve to chart a (somewhat) singular course, the confidence to enter the arena without the proper coaching to achieve greatness, and is unabashed in flashing us the raw potential. It also soars high into Gotham’s night sky before cratering into its sewers, leaving a feeling of excellence that the film only partially justifies. It should have done much of what it did but failed to see it was wasting its potential by refusing to resolve its many defects, mistaking them for artistic complements to its big picture. It is too dark for its own good, too elementary to rise above good, too inconsistent to have staying power, and too hobbled by its insistence to finish strong. It is the Michael Olowokandi, Stephon Marbury, and Albert Pujols of movies. In that baffling way, it is worth dissecting, discussing, and appreciating for the absurdity and the highlights. It is also worth not spending too much time past that initial dissection, discussion, and appreciation. Clippers, Knicks, and Angels fans can all agree; it’s too painful to remember.