Director: Chris Palmer
Cast: Jensen Ackles, Josh Duhamel, Naya Rivera, Billy Burke
Have I Seen it Before: Na… It’s new. I’ve read the book probably half a dozen times over the last twenty years.
Did I Like It: I’ve always been a little down on the DC animated movies. Their attempts to condense the great comic arcs into a movie less than an hour and a half always left me just wanting to read the books themselves. The Dark Knight Returns Part One and Two (2012, 2013) had something to it, Hush (2019) underwhelmed, and Death in the Family (2020) struck me as quite possibly the most frustrating bat-film ever produced.
So where does this one land in that spectrum? Somewhere in the middle. Giving the story two parts lets it breath a bit, especially when the source material is a limited run, and not a year-long (or multi-year) storyline. I have some vague ambition to track down part two now, so my interest in the adaptation hasn’t abated from my morbid curiosity about this first installment. The performances are on average, pretty average. Anyone other than Kevin Conroy playing Batman/Bruce Wayne in an animated production always feels like a misstep, and Ackles does the thankless job of not drawing attention to himself. Troy Baker, on the other hand, so desperately apes the timbre, cadence, and cackle of Mark Hamill that the homage only made me long for the original more. Jack Quaid brings all of his squirrely energy to Alberto Falcone. You may think mentioning a side character isn’t worth the word count in this review, but… Well, you just need to take in the story for yourself.
Just how you might end up taking in that story brings me to the big point.I still end up falling just shy of a complete recommendation of the film. When I first read the graphic novel all those years ago, I made the remark that it would make a great Batman movie. And it did. With some shift in focus, it was called The Dark Knight (2008). Go watch that movie, or go read the graphic novel. They’re far more worthy of your time.