The Return

review written 3/17/2009

This Batman short looks back to the early days of the character, when he was dealing with mobsters and small-time crooks rather than Penguins and people with freeze rays. Back when people still referred to a giant bat swooping about the streets. In fact, it's told largely from the point of view of just the class of people talking about the giant bat.

Gotham City is established through the very clever device of a sign on an ersatz taxi. Very clever. The score choiceat the outset is a little low-rent for my taste, but I'm willing to give proceedings the benefit of the doubt based on a couple of interesting shaky camera shots. Later sound cues improve tremendously, with some nice horror-movie sheens and creaks setting the mood.

Unfortunately, the acting just isn't up to the demands of the extended dialogue scene at the beginning. The production team is based in the UK, and at times the cast seems to be trying to split the difference between their natural accents and a more Americanized sound. Perhaps they should have tried to explain away their voices by establishing themselves as some branch of an ethnic mob splinter. We Italians have been doing it for years. The cast's age works against them as well; it's disconcerting to see young men in their twenties hanging out with older-looking faces, as if it were upsetting the mob castes.

To their credit, the filmmakers don't shy away from cinematographically difficult situations, keeping the lights down low, and when the comic book characters do show up, they don't crib from the recent Nolan movies. I appreciated the visual nods to the Red Hood frames of "The Killing Joke" as well.

Ultimately, the piece collapses under the weight of the lengthy opening dialogue, which is a shame. Any short film has trouble escaping from a long opening scene even when it's a good one. In this short's case, the flick gets better as it goes on.