Netflix Review: Batman: Year One (2011)

Should have been called Jim Gordon: Year One.

Batman: Year One is a 64-minute animated movie adaption of a four issue comic story arc published under the same name in 1987. I didn't read that arc, so I cannot comment on the movie's faithfulness to it. What I can say, however, is that I was not impressed. So much of the plot lacked plausibility and logic that the problems ultimately distracted me from whatever merits the film did have. Most of these had to do with situations facing Lt. Jim Gordon, who seems to be a much more central character to the story than Bruce Wayne or Batman. Gordon is transferred from the Chicago Police Department and joins the Gotham PD. What didn't make sense to me here is that if Gotham is such a corrupt police department, why would they hire an outsider at his rank? Ethically challenged police departments typically try to promote internally so as to maintain the status quo.

In one scene, a crime boss laments that he had such high hopes for Gordon after being upset at one of Gordon's subordinates for stepping down at a hostage situation when Gordon ordered him to do so. This made no sense at all to me. Why did he care what happened in this hostage situation? What did he have to gain or lose? It's obvious that the writers wanted to express the point that Gordon was undermining the corruption of the police to the chagrin of the commissioner and the cronies, but the actual events that they cite as Gordon's faults don't make any sense. Likewise, at one point cops shoot a disguised Bruce Wayne, who goes unconscious, and they put him in the back of their police cruiser. Stopping here, this could make sense: they shot someone who was unarmed and not threatening them; there were scores of witnesses, but they were mostly in the prostitution industry and did not want to lose their favored position with the police; standard procedure would have been to call an ambulance, but since they put a man who is bleeding out in their own cruiser, I figured they were going to dump his body. But then the writers screw it up by having the cops say, "He might not make it. Oh well, one less mouth for the soup kitchen to feed." So they are trying to save him, but don't call an ambulance? What?



Interestingly, there are no traditional Batman villains in this movie. The enemy, it seems, is the Gotham PD itself (which, to be frank, is more powerful than any other of Batman's enemies). But I can't even talk about this without running into logical problems with the story. The specific people Batman fights are drug traffickers, pimps, and the paid-off police profiting from it. But these (with the exception of the latter) are technically victimless crimes; most of the violence associated with them results from their being conducted in a black market setting. However, if the police are totally in on it, what are the incentives for violence? It becomes more of gray market, as it were. Hence, it doesn't make any sense that street crime is reduced, as is reported on the TV in one scene, when Batman starts to enforce victimless crime laws.


Frustratingly, the real crimes occur near the beginning with the full acceptance of Lt. Gordon. On his first day at work, he meets a GPD detective who commits felony assault against a monk soliciting Gordon (who voices not a peep of displeasure) and then proceeds to batter a teenager and throw him in a dumpster for no reason at all. It is not until Gordon himself is assaulted that he takes any action at all against this detective and therefore spoils any sense of heroism surrounding him (which is too bad since he is voiced by Bryan Cranston. Sorry, but the B.A.-ness of Walter White does not show through here). One could say that this isn't any different from the Jim Gordon of Batman Begins. He said, "I'm no rat." However, one got the sense that Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon would probably meet his end in trying to combat corruption on his own, and therefore kept quiet out of desire for self-preservation. That made sense. However, Bryan Cranston's Jim Gordon was a martial arts practitioner who literally beat up a Green Beret. Thus, the sense we get from Gordon here is that he has the power to help people but chooses not to.

The action scenes also leave much to be desired. An example is when Batman is cornered in a building by a trigger-happy SWAT team that shoots at anything that moves. When they find Batman, they do all they can to light him up. He is able to pick off a few but they eventually get him out in the open and only then do they hold him at gunpoint and approach him. Of course, it is at this time that he summons bats and is able to escape, but it only seems that he does so at the inexplicable mercy of a team of mercenaries that only seconds before shot hundreds of rounds at him. Other scenes seem to try to remind you that you are watching a cartoon, such as when Bruce Wayne is able to climb up to a high roof top by first jumping on a truck, then jumping to a low roof, then working his way to standing on a flag pole by swinging on it like a gymnast, and then finally getting to the top of the building by making a vertical leap that is nearly twice his height. Not to be left at that, he then jumps directly from a city building rooftop to the top of a moving truck. Really?

And, as is the reputation of cartoons, it felt like it was a kids' movie, based on the lack of coherence and physical plausibility. Don't listen to the IGN reviewer who called it "serious, adult entertainment." Sorry, but putting in some hookers and dropping some F-bombs does not an "adult" movie make. Speaking of hookers, did you know Selina Kyle is one? Again, it does not make sense to me that someone who has the physical and martial arts abilities to square off with Bruce Wayne would choose such an occupation.

It is almost amazing that so many problems could be fit into such a short film. This is really too bad because as far as animated movies and series about superheroes go, Batman has usually had some of the better ones. Batman: Year One is not one of them.