Well, not that it's any surprise coming from Shapiro, but that seems like a highly questionable assertion to me. I think this movie is considerably
less ambivalent towards the Batman character than the Nolan films in general and
The Dark Knight especially. That film went to great lengths to paint Batman and the Joker as a kind of duality and even borderline co-dependent, but when Riddler tries to paint himself in more or less the same way in this film, he's portrayed as completely delusional. And Nolan's last two films were all about the psychological struggles of whether Batman should even exist, where this Batman's psychological struggle is simply about whether or not he's "making a difference", i.e., is crimefighting hard enough.
Otherwise, though, it's amusing to me how closely this one followed the Nolan template, at least in a lot of superficial ways - their conception of the Catwoman character especially is only very lightly modified from the Nolan films, down to the detail of avoiding the name "Catwoman". And they even repeat the big structural mistake that Nolan made in
The Dark Knight, which is to wrap up the story that thefilm was telling, only to jump off into a completely different story in the last third. I won't say that the movie is "too long", exactly, but (as with the Nolan!) that last third was easily the least interesting part of the movie and really tried my patience.
Some other stray observations:
-What exactly was the point of having the Penguin in this movie? He's really barely in it, he has no meaningful impact on the plot, and Farrell's characterization of him was pretty indistinctive. He seems basically here just so that the marketing could say that the Penguin was in the movie. I guess it's suggested that he'll have a bigger role in the sequel, but with everything that's suggested at the end of this movie to be in the sequel ... well,
Batman 2: Vengeance is going to be more overstuffed with characters than any Avengers movie.
-Come to think of it, Dano's Riddler wasn't in the movie just a whole lot, either. Also, Kravitz's Catwoman disappears for very lengthy stretches, with the filmmakers seemingly needing to be reminded now and again that she's actually in this movie. Whatever else one might say about this film, it has less emphasis on its villains than any other Batman movie I've ever seen.
-This is an awfully convoluted plot, but it doesn't go anywhere, and then Batman kinda literally pulls the carpet up out from under it anyway and reveals that none of the first two-thirds even mattered. And while I appreciate giving Jeffrey Wright a lot of screentime as Gordon, it's a bit strange watching a Batman movie that for long stretches is basically a detective movie with the two of them as partners. The script could have maybe used another few drafts that made Gordon more of a secondary character and raised the profile of Catwoman. Or something. All I know is that the filmmakers aren't able to keep all these balls in the air.
-Agreed with DI that Turturro is great.
-One thing that was a little jarring to me were the repeated scenes where Batman was just hanging out with the cops, investigating crime scenes and shit. In that way - and that way only! - it actually was reminiscent of the 1960s TV show, where Batman could show up and say "Aha, a clue!".
-There is a scene in this movie that I think is the single most implausible scene in any movie ever,
especially taking the rules of the film's own universe into account:
Batman gets knocked unconscious and is taken into the custody of the police, who don't see who he is under the mask? These cops are already demonstrated to be untrusting and borderline hostile to Batman! I guess we're supposed to believe that Gordon held them at bay, but even he had already hinted that he resented not knowing who Batman was. There's just no fucking way to believe that they wouldn't have taken the mask off, no matter what explanation we can imagine. I can believe that Eli Roth killed Hitler more than I can believe this.
