Slighted by Batman’s unwillingness to recognise him as his arch enemy, the Joker (Zach Galifianakis) hatches a plan to make the Dark Knight (Will Arnett) take notice — involving the Lego universe’s greatest villains descending on Gotham to take control of the city once and for all. Historically, the prevailing wisdom about Batman is this: dark and moody is good, comedic and silly is bad. Just compare and contrast the reputations of The Dark Knight (anarchy and politics) and Batman & Robin (ice skating and Bat-nipples). The truth (as is usually the case) is more complex than that, but it highlights the problem facing The Lego Batman Movie — can this comedic take on the Dark Knight work? Of course, the signs were good — Will Arnett’s tongue-in-cheek take on the character was one of The Lego Movie’s many joys, and his promotion to the lead role here takes away none of his impact. The best Batman film in years. Batman is Gotham’s hero, singular, and that’s the way he likes it.
But when Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) succeeds her father as commissioner, she suggests Batman’s history of always foiling the villains’ evil plots, but mostly letting them escape to plot again, perhaps isn’t the ideal state of affairs and proposes a closer working relationship. Not that it matters; no sooner has she taken office than the Joker (Zach Galifianakis), offended by Batman’s refusal to acknowledge him as his main adversary (“I’m fighting a few different people. I like to fight around”) gathers up his criminal cronies and surrenders. But to Gordon, not Batman. Outraged by this, Batman decides to go rogue — breaking into Arkham Asylum to banish the Joker to the Phantom Zone. It’s a film dense with jokes, the writers riffing successfully on both this sullen and arrogant iteration of Batman and the character’s rich and varied history. The films are referenced (“That time with the parade and the Prince music”), as are the TV series and comics. And all the sources are mined for the film’s stuffed rogues’ gallery — Polka-Dot Man, Gentleman Ghost and the Condiment King among the villains appearing in cameo roles.
And then, for the final battle, more are unleashed. A standard complaint about superhero films is there are too many bad guys (Spider-Man 3 overstretched by adding Venom to Sandman and the New Goblin), but here Gremlins, Daleks, The Matrixs Agent Smith, Dracula, Godzilla, Sauron, Lord Voldemort and more are all unleashed without any issue. Just occasionally more is more, and so it proves here. Whether or not we deserve it is irrelevant — this is the Batman movie we needed right now. But for all the fan service and subtle jokes, this is still ostensibly a film for kids to be taken to (and it’s been two decades since we had a Batman film like that) and, as such, there is a lesson for Batman (and the kids) to learn. Namely, teamwork is good, friends are important, don’t spend your nights sitting alone eating reheated lobster thermidor. This manifests itself in confirmed loner Bruce Wayne absent-mindedly adopting orphan Dick Grayson (Michael Cera) who discovers the Batcave and wants to become his sidekick.
And later, to Batman’s dismay, the Bat-team grows further. Only if they work together will they defeat the Joker’s growing army. This point does become laboured as Bats continually refuses to accept it, but there’s so much going on, it’s easy to forgive. This is the third time Batman has featured in a major cinematic release in the past 11 months. And, if anything, with the release of The Lego Batman Movie, those films have reversed the prevailing wisdom: dark and moody is bad, comedic and silly is good. Whether or not we deserve it is irrelevant — this is the Batman movie we needed right now. A highly quotable, visual treat that’s packed with in-jokes but is entertaining enough on its own terms to work for fans and non-fans alike. The best Batman film in years.The Lego Batman Movie is more or less the sort of movie I had originally expected The Lego Movie to be, which is fine, but not very surprising. The movie opens in fully self-aware, smart-aleck mode, with the voice of Will Arnett as Lego Batman knowingly commenting on cinematic conventions (“All important movies start with a black screen”).
The first act makes a joke of Batman’s aura of invincibility by having him easily defeat all his enemies at once — not only heavy hitters like the Joker, the Riddler, Catwoman, Bane, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, Clayface and Mr. Freeze, but obscure figures like Crazy Quilt, the Calculator, the Eraser, Killer Moth, Gentleman Ghost, even the Condiment King. “They’re just making some of these up,” my 8-year-old daughter whispers to me. Before I can tell her that they’re all real characters, an onscreen character asks, “Okay, are you making some of these up?” “Nope, they’re all real,” smirks the Joker (Zach Galifianakis). “Probably worth a Google.” Despite the villainous full-court press, Batman’s victory is so assured that no one is even worried about it. Clearly, something subversive has to happen to kick things out of superhero-movie business as usual and challenge Batman to his core. Would you believe…a giant swirling energy portal in the sky?
I am not kidding. And it’s not a Lego portal either, or a gateway to the non-Lego world like the swirly-energy frontier in The Lego Movie. Just a standard-issue computer-generated swirly energy portal to another in-universe dimension (the Negative Zone) like practically every superhero movie these days. , with the energy beam smugly remarking “I am a portal to another dimension, probably” and offering observations like: Traffic reports in superhero movies are like, “looks like there’s another Giant Sky Beam, so plan for some congestion around the middle of our New York-type city.” Yet by this point all the self-awareness has drained out of The Lego Batman Movie, and nobody even comments on the sky-portal cliché. It’s like spoofing or subverting movie tropes was too hard, so director Chris McKay and the long, long list of writers ultimately decided to settle for making a plain old superhero movie — just, you know, with Legos and jokes. There are pointed jokes about Batman as a character that stick, but no pointed jokes about the audience for Batman movies or for superhero movies generally — nothing that feels like the filmmakers are willing to take even a nip at the hand that feeds them, either consumer-wise or corporate-wise.
When The Lego Movie gave us a protagonist whose favorite restaurant was any chain restaurant and who happily drank overpriced coffee because he just wanted to fit in and be accepted, it was slyly making fun of the consumerist culture that produces movies like The Lego Movie. If any phenomenon in contemporary popular culture deserves to be made fun of, it’s superhero movie culture — but The Lego Batman Movie just wants to fit in and be accepted. Like The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie shares modern Hollywood animation’s relentless freneticism, but The Lego Movie’s subversive wit is missing here. The movie’s best idea, almost its only idea, is that Batman’s super-cool aura of awesomeness, toughness and invincibility masks an underlying social isolation and fear of emotional connection and vulnerability. In spite of his reputation as the greatest superhero of all, he’s actually so cluelessly self-absorbed and lacking in empathy that he’s not a full-fledged good guy at all.
Apparently because of the trauma of losing his parents at a young age, Batman is afraid to let anyone else get close. This includes his fellow Justice Leaguers, whom he assumes are as lonely and brooding as he is, but aren’t. It includes young Dick Grayson (Michael Cera), who’s star-struck by both of Batman’s identities. And it includes the Joker, who wants the validation of being acknowledged as Batman’s archnemesis. Remember when Heath Ledger’s Joker said to Batman “You complete me”? The Lego Batman Movie has Batman repeatedly watching the original “You complete me” scene from Jerry Maguire and laughing uproariously every time. Linking his social isolation to his above-the-law tactics, the movie pits Batman against the successor to retiring Commissioner Gordon (Hector Elizondo), Gordon’s daughter Barbara (Rosario Dawson), who is not yet but will be Batgirl. For no good reason at all, Barbara is given the same kind of swoony, time-stopping, male-gazey glamour intro as Wyldstyle in the original Lego Movie.
There it kind of made sense, because Emmet was a quintessentially ordinary, inside-the-box guy and Wyldstyle was an exotic herald of a mysterious larger world. Batman has been rubbing shoulders with the likes of Wonder Woman, Catwoman and Poison Ivy for — well, decades, really, as The Lego Batman Movie doesn’t mind jokingly noting. Why would Barbara Gordon rock Batbro’s world like this? There doesn’t seem to be anything here beyond the generic joke about the effect of a beautiful woman on the male brain. Barbara threatens to introduce a second idea as she argues that lawless, unaccountable vigilantism is unacceptable and Batman will have to work within the rules. Of course this idea is quickly lost in the chaos of the final act, in which Batman actually recruits all of his normal enemies to defeat the extracanonical villains arrayed against him (Voldemort, Sauron, King Kong, etc.), all conveniently stored in the Phantom Zone. The Phantom Zone is introduced by the revelation that Lego Superman recently dispatched Lego General Zod there, I guess because someone involved in this movie realized that snapping a bad guy’s neck is something no Superman worth his salt would do — but of course there can’t be a joke about how Superman would never do such a thing.
There can be 10,000 jokes about past franchises, from the Christopher Reeve Superman films to the old 1940s Batman serials, but the new DC movie universe is still being built, so there can’t be a jab at that. That would be biting the hand that feeds. There’s the same sort of group-hug ending as The Lego Movie, with Batman learning a valuable lesson, like Mr. Incredible over a dozen years ago, about how people need each other and you can’t just work alone because you’re afraid of losing people. Yet even as he acknowledges that he needs the Joker as much as the Joker needs him, his old narcissism is still in play: “You are the reason,” he tells the Joker, “that I get up at 4 P.M. and work out until my chest is positively sick.” Batman’s made progress, I guess, but the franchise hasn’t. Steven D. Greydanus is the Register’s film critic and creator of Decent Films. He is a permanent deacon in the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter.