Christopher Nolan’s Batman films aged incredibly fast. The shine had hardly faded from The Dark Knight‘s Oscar win before many were lining up to knock that film’s follow-up, The Dark Knight Rises, with claims of pompous pretension, overstuffed plot points, and performances too sincere to handle. Nolan’s films hadn’t changed but the audience had. Of course, the audience was still there, lining up around the corner to see it, but their enthusiasm had waned and gone were the days where awards envy was so large that they actually changed the rules of the Oscars to accommodate them. It says something that The LEGO Batman Movie is the most positively accepted Batman product since 2008’s The Dark Knight. It’s a further spiraling out toward silliness and absurdity. The Twenty-First Century was the one that made comic book films prestige, but could the market be so flooded with comic material that we’re thirsting for satire? The success of LEGO Batman seems to suggest we’re at least open to it.

2014’s The LEGO Movie was a cheeky hit with a string of characters famous throughout pop culture. Batman (voiced by Will Arnett) was one of the stand-outs, for sure, but you could have pegged me as shocked to learn that they were crafting an entire film based on this character. Arnett returns to voice the plastic caped crusader, and he’s joined by Ralph Fiennes who voices Alfred, Zach Galifinakis who voices the Joker, Michael Cera who voices Dick Grayson (also known as Robin) and Rosario Dawson, who voices Barbara Gordon, the new police commissioner after her father, famed Jim Gordon (Héctor Elizondo), retires from his post. Barbara hopes to protect Gotham City without Batman, and gains public support when she mentions his long standing record of fighting but not exactly catching the bad guys. Meanwhile, the young orphan Dick hopes to get adopted by Bruce Wayne before knowing the billionaire’s secret identity, creating a tense home dynamic where Batman must learn to work alongside Dick and Barbara to defeat an emotionally sensitive Joker who’s cooked up a massive scheme in an attempt to get the title of Batman’s Greatest Enemy.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the writer-directors from the original LEGO Movie, are only producers this time. Chris McKay directs this film, but the same manic, joke-a-rama nature is present. Like The LEGO Movie, LEGO Batman abandons all sincerity until it decides that it actually needs it, but is more than anything a non-stop torrent of irony and mockery. It’s apparent to me that Hollywood is apparently okay with a Hollywood film making jokes of its most prized franchises as long as the characters within those jokes are made of LEGOs. Of course, this movie is very funny, and Arnett’s compulsive, egomaniacal Batman is surprisingly palatable over a full film. Arnett has made a joke out of his voice for his entire career, but LEGO Batman may be the most useful implementation of that tool. LEGO Batman straddles the line between homoerotic humor and gay panic, but considering it’s a film for children, I’d say little damage is done. Overall, this film is as advertised, a mindless romp through a LEGO world where we get to take your favorite characters and have a big ol’ laugh at their expense.

 

 

Directed by Chris McKay