Underwhelming

I was expecting great things from this and, while it had some real merit, it was rather uninspired.

It looked incredible and Pattinson was surprisingly good as Batsy and B-Wayne, and the music was fantastic, but it was a long slog with very little that made you ‘wow’.

The fight scenes were… meh, and the action scenes muddled. It was hard to see what was going on during the car chase, and the Batmobile - usually a highlight in these films - was some kind of compromise version which had neither the battle-tank quality of Nolan’s, nor the sleek dildo quality of Burton’s. It was just a souped-up car with a sprinkling of armour and a thruster.

Wokeness was present. A gang of thugs at the start are goading a semi-reluctant new member to attack a civilian. The goaders are all white, of course, and the thug with a conscience is black, of course. Several good characters are race-swapped from white to black (Gordon, Catwoman, mayor) and most obnoxiously Blackwoman refers to evil ‘white’ elites. Thomas Wayne is also slimed somewhat in a retrofitted backstory. All villains are, of course, white. The film is racist crap and you shoudn’t pay to see it under any circumstances.

With the spectre of the Nolan films still hovering over culture this needed to be something really special to stand out, and it just wasn’t. Nolan gave us The Scarecrow’s disturbing demonic hallucinations, Heath Ledger’s fantastic Joker, Bane’s creepy ass voice, a football field imploding mid-game, and action scenes with real tension. This had no such wow-factor, it was all serviceable but kinda bland.

For some reason this was rated 15 in the UK. I found it to be no stronger than the 12-rated Nolans, even tamer in fact. They should have gone all out with an ‘R’ and given us something special in the violence department. Let’s have some blood and bone-crunching violence, think Sin-City.

So yeah, it’s worth watching for the mood and some decent scenes but there are too many characters and it’s hard to care about much of anything.