Quirky Batman rebuild

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This article was published 11/02/2017 (3135 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In The Lego Movie, Batman was a jerky, self-absorbed, scene-stealing minor character. Now he has his own movie, and he’s running with it.

In Lego-movie terms, this sequel doesn’t have the bite of the first, which somehow managed to be a toy-based neo-Marxist critique of consumer capitalism.

As a Batman movie, however, this smart, self-aware, fast and funny outing is just made to puncture the self-serious, overinflated mythos of the post-Nolan Bat.

Sad Ben Affleck’s problems just got worse.

The movie, which works for kids and adults, sets up the Dark Knight’s Nietzschean persona in order to have fun with it. Arrested Development’s Will Arnett channels that Christian Bale rasp and edgy brooding, while the animators play up the scale and shadows of Bruce Wayne’s gloomy baronial mansion.

But all this darkness is quickly dispelled when, after a hard night saving the city, Batman comes home to microwave his lobster thermidor and watch Jerry Maguire.

This routine is interrupted when Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) takes over as police commissioner. Distrusting Batman’s vaguely fascist lone-wolf tendencies and extrajudicial antics, she advocates a team-based approach, along with a blend of accessibility and accountability, “statistics and compassion.” ]

As Gordon points out, despite being Gotham’s self-appointed defender for almost 80 years, Batman hasn’t really dented the crime rate.

Batman’s problems with this new community-policing style are complicated by issues in his personal life, including the arrival of plucky orphan Dick Grayson (Michael Cera), whom he has inadvertently adopted. Meanwhile, Alfred (Ralph Fiennes), Batman’s butler and father-figure, is reading Setting Limits for your Out-of-Control Child. Even the Joker (Zach Galifianakis) is making demands, complaining that Batman can’t commit to a one-on-one superhero-supervillain relationship, like Superman’s super-tight thing with Zod.

Soon, Batman will have to bust out of his self-imposed isolation to save Gotham — and maybe himself.

This second Lego movie lacks the novelty and the meticulous world-building of the first, which really looked as if it had been sweetly and patiently built out of little Lego blocks. The animation, under director Chris McKay (Robot Chicken), has a more generic CGI look and the action zips along so frenetically that we barely have time to look around.

The performances are mostly very good. Arnett’s self-deluded narcissism is so over-the-top it becomes weirdly sympathetic. Dawson is full of bracing good sense without being reduced to a female killjoy character, and Cera’s gee-whiz enthusiasm is irresistible.

Oddly enough, Galifianakis as the Joker is the one weak link. Despite being one of the funniest humans around, his comic style is maybe too understated for vocal work.

The script is packed with satirical jabs at the DC “extended universe” franchise. When Batman tells the Joker that his greatest enemy is Superman, the Joker is puzzled. “Superman’s not even a bad guy,” he points out, confirming the feelings of legions of Batman v Superman haters.

In another scene, Batman questions Gordon’s plan for defeating their enemies, which sounds an awful lot like the plot of Suicide Squad: “You want to get a bunch of criminals together to fight another bunch of criminals? That’s a stupid idea.”

While the movie cheerfully lampoons comic-book-movie clichés, it occasionally falls into typical superhero stuff itself, overextending its welcome, for instance, with one of those familiar cataclysmic finales, complete with downtown destruction and extra-dimensional beings.

Of course, it helps that the extra-dimensional beings include the Daleks, a velociraptor and Lego Lord Voldemort and that most of the violence involves characters making “pew, pew” noises when they shoot their guns.

That’s the thing about Lego movies: even the clichés are cute.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca