Review: Batman needs a renewal. ‘The Batman,’ starring Robert Pattinson, isn’t quite it
When the title character first sheds his cape and cowl in “The Batman,” a moody, methodical and, finally, disappointing return to Gotham City, your initial glimpse of Bruce Wayne might come as a mild shock. Not because of the fine actor playing him — it’s Robert Pattinson, as if you didn’t know — but because of the heavy bruises darkening his pale face, as if he’d been wearing a mask beneath his mask. Bloody beatings are to be expected for a vigilante trawling Gotham’s lower depths by night, but these particular wounds might well have been inflicted from within. This Bruce Wayne doesn’t look like a playboy or a billionaire, let alone a hero; with his unkempt sidelocks and air of morning-after debasement, he’s more like an addict about to crash, or a young rock star gone to seed.
The director, Matt Reeves, who wrote the movie’s dense screenplay with Peter Craig, plays up these associations with an early snippet of Kurt Cobain singing “Something in the Way,” a
