Batman: The Killing Joke (2016) Review!!!

Synopsis – As Batman hunts for the escaped Joker, the Clown Prince of Crime attacks the Gordon family to prove a diabolical point mirroring his own fall into madness.

My Take – While DC continues to find a holding on the big screen, it has been doing quite well on the smaller screen (Arrow, The Flash) and has been excelling with their animated film. So naturally when DC announced that one of Batman’s most unique and controversial tale would be getting a R rated animated adaption, I slapped a huge expectations sticker on my forehead. Considering, their recent adaption of Frank Miller‘s Dark Knight Returns, was one of the best animated films I had ever seen. Not only is this one of the most acclaimed novels ever but it’s one of the most controversial. The story is basically an origin tale for the infamous Batman villain, The Joker. With that said, this adaptation turned out to be a huge disappointment! I really wanted to like this film I really did. I wanted to like everything about it. From its revival of the good old’ Batman TAS to the voice actors to the sweeping soundtrack, the polished animation reflecting a dark nature of Gotham and its residents. The core issue of this movie is not the story it chose to tell but the way it was told. It blatantly deflects the attention off of Batman and Joker, and into a Batgirl tale.

Knowing there needed to be material added for proper length, I was glad to hear they added more Batgirl backstory. It’s not like the prologue is god damn awful like most reviewers are calling it, but in retrospect, it really dampens the impact of later events in the film, instead of strengthening them. The story follows Batman (voiced by Kevin Conroy), Joker (voiced by Mark Hamill) and Batgirl (voiced by Tara Strong). The prologue is focused on Batman and Batgirl’s relationship and their efforts to catching the rising gangster Francesco (voiced by John DiMaggio). As Francesco gets obsessed with Batgirl, her working relationship with Batman deteriorates. Once the prologue ends, we follow Joker, who has escaped from Arkham Asylum and is planning a whole show for Batman, while the film also gives an insight of who he was before he became the clown prince of crime. There’s enough of a power in Moore’s chronicling of the Joker paying forward his descent into madness that a decent amount of his unforgettable darkness holds up here, even diluted. Certain sequences – largely the central set piece of the Joker’s macabre, carnivalesque torture of Commissioner Gordon – hit their strides with horrific precision. Even an ill-advised musical interlude(!) plays as the right form of disturbing. Still, Moore’s prose has a particular rhythm that cinema for the most part has struggled to translate, and director Sam Liu & screenwriter Brian Azzarello‘s crack at working in Moore’s philosophical monologues naturalistically is a helpful reminder of how it’s sometimes best if comic book dialogue stays on the page. It might have helped to have complimentary stylized artwork, as in the comic, but the film’s animation is hugely underwhelming, shooting for the iconic, blocky ’90s cartoon aesthetic, but lacking its atmospheric, chiaroscuro artistry. Things pep up slightly in the peppered fight interludes, helped immensely by ferociously crackling sound editing that makes bullets and punches pop with rare vibrancy. However, action is largely besides the point here, and as such these are the most fleeting of diversions. The relationship between Batman and Batgirl in the film is completely different from any comic I’ve read. Batman and Batgirl have a paternal relationship, not a sexual one. But here, Batman and Batgirl have sex, and they play it off as if this has ever happened in the comics. How about we talk about the scene where Barbara Gordon is shot. You can tell a comic scene is terribly adapted when Birds of Prey does a better job at it. Despite being the titular character, Batman is pretty much a lazy story exposition. Says the most obvious things. Has no inner conflict.

Has no fears. Has no emotions no feelings yet in the end we are supposed to feel his turmoil in fighting the Joker. Batman ladies and gents, is purely a device in this film. Batgirl was fan-service. And the movie spent a good 40 minutes setting up her love story to Batman when all of this information could’ve been relayed in a few key scenes! While, this part of the film is undoubtedly the worst from a storytelling standpoint, there are a number of things that remained consistently bad throughout. Most notably was the animation. From a studio like Warner Bros you’d expect some decent art work, but not here. The back drops nor art design is well put together. It’s clunky, with no style to be found. Then came the second half of the film, and the story is finally about the Joker, who replaces Batgirl as the new central character, as the film now explores his life and point of view. The transition between first half and second half of the film was rather poor, like it suddenly became a different story from another movie with the same characters. The main antagonist of the first half is never mentioned again, and the expanded relationship between Batman and Batgirl also didn’t add much emotional struggle to Batman’s fight against the Joker either, especially since Batman remains highly stoic and unchanged from beginning to end. Here Joker isn’t a witty clever funny man anymore. Now he’s just misunderstood and 10x darker than Nolan‘s version. Although voiced by Hamill, he doesn’t even compare to the TAS Joker who lit up the screen. Going to credit this to mediocre writing. Obvious things (90% Batman lines), dumb things (35% Batgirl lines) and unfunny things (75% Joker lines) should not exist. The film doesn’t commit enough to the drama of the story. Even with its R rating it doesn’t draw the same toughness the novel does. It lacks the rawness that the novel has to make it’s audience queasy. It’s not graphic enough to be disturbing and it’s not lighthearted enough to be fun. It just bounces from scene to scene with little connecting one to another. The best way to describe it is that it goes from this scene to that scene and than it ends. That’s about it. It seemed Kevin Conroy didn’t really want to be in this film, as he brings absolutely nothing new to the table. I may also be a sucker for Hamill as the Joker but how can one not be when he always sinks his teeth in and makes him a real presence in a room? Adding to this he creates a good, relatable voice for pre-transformation Joker in the flashbacks and we get drawn in to his story in large part because that voice acting comes through. Tara Strong is wasted. This is one film that should have been great. All the pieces are there. It has a great studio behind it, an excellent voice team, and a brilliant story. But it lacks the emotional power that the novel has. The novel’s writer, Alan Moore, has stated that it’s about two characters that don’t really relate to the world but are nearly mirror images of each other, because of one bad day. That idea is fascinating, and it’s touched upon, but I would have liked to have seen more of that psyche. On the whole, ‘Batman: The Killing Joke’ is a clumsy, rushed, and ideologically dubious treatment that befits neither the strength of the story itself, or the talented performers who fight admirably to bring it to life. R-rated and source of good combat sequences or not, it’s one of the more sluggish animated Batman works, and memorable primarily for its faults, apart from Hamill’s stellar work.