![]() ![]() The film’s story, such as it is, is rooted in Batman’s obsessive desire to be left alone. It’s a reassessment, an intervention, an effort to try and remember what’s fun about him and what maybe needs to remain on the cutting-room floor. ![]() How much more Batman could anyone possibly stand? But The Lego Batman Movie works precisely because it knows audiences are sick of its hero. Last year, we saw Zack Snyder somehow attempt to combine Nolan’s forbidding darkness and Burton’s cartoonishness into one hero (played by Ben Affleck) in Batman v. There was Christopher Nolan’s gritty Dark Knight (Christian Bale), a practical, grounded, yet still undeniably unhinged vigilante far removed from Burton’s pulpier excesses-who starred in three films. Moviegoers have been besieged with Bat-content in recent years. When he’s not out in Gotham, though, he’s whiling away the time in the gilded cage that is his mansion, watching romantic comedies alone ( Jerry Maguire is a perpetual favorite), warming up lobster thermidor in the microwave, and barking at his butler Alfred, waiting desperately for that Bat-signal to show up in the sky again. ![]() The East Coast Is Going to Get Arkansas-ified Robinson MeyerĪs the film begins, Batman (given the same gravelly voice that Will Arnett ably provided in The Lego Movie) is the hero of Gotham-always handily defeating a familiar list of supervillains led by the demented Joker (a gleeful Zach Galifianakis). As such, it’s a wry piece of meta-commentary that deconstructs (no pun intended) everyone’s favorite moody hero using the anarchic animated style of the Lego world. It’s a one-joke movie that’s based on a really funny joke. It is also, however, a terrific adaptation of Tim Burton’s gag-a take on Batman that sees the sitcom humor in his absurd lifestyle, brutalizing criminals by night and wasting his days in a cavernous mansion with only an elderly butler to talk to. The Lego Batman Movie is, on one level, a work of crass commercialism, just like its predecessor The Lego Movie. It’s a brilliant gag on Burton and Keaton’s part-a sly nod to the reality that, when he’s not cleaning up the streets of Gotham, Batman is a sad, lonely man, a billionaire unfulfilled by anything except putting on the mask. Suddenly, the Bat-signal flashes into the sky Bruce’s head jerks up, and he leaps into action, energized by the grim purpose of his secret crime-fighting identity. Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) sits in his desk chair, brooding silently in a giant, dark office, with seemingly nothing to do. Moviegoers’ first look at the Caped Crusader in Tim Burton’s 1992 gothic masterpiece Batman Returns was a peculiar one. ![]()
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