a5c7b9f00b 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. Batman: The Killing Joke fails both its source materialwella general movie. It doesn&#39;t understand what made the original story so good. It doesn&#39;t understand the character of Barbara Gordon a.k.a. Bat girl. Its technical aspects leave a lot to be desired. And it doesn&#39;t even know how pacing works.<br/><br/>But first, let&#39;s go over the upsides. It is genuinely pleasing to hear both Mark HamillwellKevin Conroy reprise their rolesJoker and Batman, respectively. Tara StrongBarbara is also something I will never complain about. The story is not half bad when it is actually about The Killing Joke, especially about Joker&#39;s supposed past. And even the animation, cheap thoughit looks, can be forgiven when you remember that this was made direct to video on a shoestring budget.<br/><br/>Then the problems. They needed to pad out the story. This I can somewhat understand because the original story isn&#39;t that long. Making that padding about Barbara is also understandable because the original story has her in a large part and she&#39;s the least known out of the principal characters. But did they really have to give her a gay best friend? Did they really have to make the entire first half of the film revolve around her teenage angst because Bruce doesn&#39;t luv luv her? I mean, here I thought superhero stories could be about man&#39;s struggle with his inner demons reflected on the horrors of the real world. About symbolic battle between shades of light and dark. About discrimination, racism, oppression, difficulties of morality in a world where nothing is truly black or white. But no, apparently superhero stories are just sitcoms where people dress funny.<br/><br/>Furthermore, The Killing Joke, the original comic, was such a big thing because it was one of the first stories to really explore the possibility of Joker having a past. Plus it challenged the status quo. Things changed because of it, characters evolved. And this film simply cannot deliver that. Joker&#39;s backstory has already been suggested millions of times, there is no status quo to be broken and even the shock value of Joker doing such brutal things that they seem out of character even for him doesn&#39;t have much impact because we&#39;ve seen worse from him. In a movie called The Dark Knight. One of the greatest movies ever made. Perhaps you&#39;ve heard of it.<br/><br/>To add insult to injury, the movie doesn&#39;t even earn its R rating. It&#39;s a marketing ploy. I&#39;ve seen movies from the 80s rated PG-13 that have more gore, violence and sexual content than this has.<br/><br/>And yet this film is not the worst. Not even the worst animated Batman film. The voice acting is strong, the original story is good, borderline great, and the animation has some good moments. Even its flaws are merely annoying. Not something I&#39;d recommend, but it&#39;s watchable. On what should of been a fantastic film, the movie is horrifyingly bland and dull thanks to the incoherent story that ruins the film. First of all, the prologue is actually better than the actual killing joke segment. I was actually intrigued on how the bat-girl story would develop and I liked the action segments that involved bat-girl. The problem begins when it switches to the killing joke story. There is no consistency and the tone is totally different from the prologue. As a result, the film suffers from a mishmash of the two tones of the beginning and middle of the film. If you want to see a batman film that combines dark and lighter fare, just watch batman forever. You won&#39;t be bored and you&#39;ll be actually entertained unlike this film.
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346 weeks ago