Batman: Gotham by Gaslight (2018)

In a Victorian-era Gotham City, Batman (voice: Bruce Greenwood) searches at night for Jack the Ripper, who is murdering prostitutes, dancers, and to a lesser extent, women in general. Aiding him is his loyal butler, Alfred (voice: Anthony Stewart Head), and to a lesser degree James Gordon (voice: Scott Patterson) and Bruce Wayne’s men’s club buddy Harvey Dent (voice: Yuri Lowenthal). Separately, Selina Kyle (voice: Jennifer Carpenter) is attempting to defend the lower-class women of the city.

This is the best Batman story to see film in 20 years. The major characters are well developed, emotional, and engaging, and the lesser ones make sense within the plot. The world is well built—call it steampunk-lite—so I knew how everything worked. They made me want to know the answers and care about what happened to Bruce and Selina. It was also a great use of Robins—as a gang of thieving orphans.

Adding to that is some of the better voice-acting we’ve had in a DC-Animated film and Batman: Gotham by Gaslight is looking like one of the great superhero films. But it isn’t. It’s good, but not great. That’s how film works: story and acting aren’t everything. So what is pulling it down? Call it the directing. The animation looks like it came from a well-done kid’s TV show, which is fine if you have a kid’s TV show. But for a feature, and an R-Rated feature at that, it is underwhelming. It’s not just that the backgrounds are about half as detailed as they should be, or that the characters are simply drawn, but that there is no style. It’s generically drab. If it looked like Mask of the Phantasm or even Batman Year One, I’d be exclaiming that finally we have a great Batman movie again. But it looks dull, and looks matter in film. And because it doesn’t look interesting, none of the action scenes are interesting. They are competent, but I cannot recall the last time I gathered all my friends together and yelled, “Hey, let’s have a wild night on the town doing something competent!” So during those action scenes, I was left thinking, which is never a good thing for a action picture. I started thinking about how Batman really didn’t do a lot of detecting, which he should have been doing. I shouldn’t have noticed, the way I don’t notice that Captain America: The Winter Soldier doesn’t makes sense while watching it. I should be caught up in the action.

Then there is Batman himself. Apparently they didn’t want to upset fanboys, so Batman looks way too much like Batman. This was a chance to do some interesting design work on his costume, but they just gave us a slightly alternate Batman. He could show up in this outfit in any of the other animated films and no one would find it out of place.

I’m sounding negative not because this film is bad, but because Batman: Gotham by Gaslight could have been so much more. It should have been on the top rungs of Batman films, and it isn’t. So, good, but disappointing.