'The Batman' Review: Robert Pattinson as vengeance is masterful, dark, and worth the wait
There have been 'Batman' movies over the last two decades, and then there's 'The Batman'. Robert Pattinson as Gotham's caped crusader is intense. He swaggers in taking the full force of a round of bullets but barely obliterated by it. His face contorts when he's angry and his gnarl is just the beginning of the whirlwind of death punches that he unfurls with absolute disdain. But when he's not lugging the thugs, he's basically a whiz. Matt Reeves 'The Batman' is a detective story with a superhero in it.
Not all of it is novel. Bruce Wayne's tragic childhood that saw his metamorphosis into the Dark Knight and brought Gotham's crime to its knees is pretty much the standard theme. In this case, Pattinson's lanky-haired Wayne is just two years into fighting crime and has an ally in Jeffrey Wright's Jim Gordon. But what stuns is the chilling narrative of a masked criminal who commits murders and then leaves cryptic messages linking to the Bat. The Riddler (Paul Dano) as he's known is on a serial-killing spree and over time the investigation unearths a conspiracy that ties back to Wayne himself.
