The Lego Batman Movie review: Batman never better as a psychopathic jerk

Recent portrayals have refused to let the orphan-turned-superhero be anything but dark, stormy and brooding.

Batman hasn’t really been fun since Adam West hung up his purple tights; once Tim Burton dressed him in black back in 1989, everybody seemed to take the new look as a state of perpetual mourning for Bruce Wayne’s murdered parents. The new Commissioner Gordon is introduced as having cleaned up Gotham’s sister city “with statistics and compassion”, and Batman finds time to ding the Suicide Squad: “Letting criminals out of prison to fight crime?” Luckily, The Lego Batman Movie retains much of its predecessor’s charm, packing in nonstop visual and verbal jokes while telling a simple, fun story with some solid lessons for the family audience. The emotional connection establishes with Batman and his relationship with others from the start makes “The Lego Batman Movie” successful on the most rudimentary of fronts. The water, smoke, and clouds are all realistically rendered, which was disappointing from the standpoint of a LEGO builder and felt like a bit of a step backward from the incredible, pure-LEGO design work on the earlier movie. Batman has to come to terms with his ultimate fear of not being able to trust anyone and being a part of a family on the fear of losing them to the dangers he faces every night.

Even so, this is the extra rare Batman movie where Batman has the most vivid and scene-stealing personality, which Will Arnett and the Lego team first mastered in The Lego Movie.

Go see The LEGO Batman Movie, but do it because you want to be entertained and amused for an hour and forty-four minutes, not because you’re expecting a uniquely LEGO experience.

Cast: Will Arnett, Ralph Fiennes, Rosario Dawson, Zach Galifianakis, Michael Cera, Channing Tatum, Mariah Carey, Billy Dee Williams, Conan O’Brien and Eddie Izzard. “It’s just a different message than what I wanted to do”, McKay says.

Headed up by the Joker (voiced by Zach Galifianakis), the crew of Arkham Asylum’s finest features well-known icons such as the Penguin (patterned after Danny DeVito’s waddler in 1992’s Batman Returns), Egghead and King Tut (both from the 1960s Batman TV series), plus lesser-known obscurities Kite Man, Gentleman Ghost and Crazy Quilt.

That it’s any good at all places it firmly in the tradition of its predecessor, The LEGO Movie, i.e., a movie that sounds like a awful filmed deal, yet turns out to be ingenious and delightful. All images courtesy Warner Bros.

The director isn’t getting a break anytime soon from the Lego movie world. But perhaps there’s another, more salient line from “The Dark Knight” that can be applied to this entertaining and surprisingly revealing movie, in which Batman finally lives long enough to see himself become the villain.