Eat your heart out, Batfleck
DON’T tell Ben Affleck – he seems sad enough already – but the actor has just been made surplus to requirements by 3.81cm of moulded plastic.
Of course I mean Lego Batman, whose debut solo feature, spun off from an extended cameo in The Lego Movie three years ago, arrives in South African cinemas, including Hemingways, tomorrow.
Followers of the current liveaction DC Comics films may not be stunned to hear it’s immeasurably more stylish, spectacular, deftly written, thematically rich, visually ravishing and generally delightful than anything yet to feature the latest, Affleck-essayed incarnation of actual Batman.
Oh, and it’s funny too. Frantically and relentlessly so, in that way you can feel your brain lurch and grab at punchlines as they whistle past your head.
While it never achieves, or even reaches for, The Lego Movie’s unexpected profundity and emotional bite, in purely logistical terms, The Lego Batman Movie is a thing of wonder.
There are around four (great) films’ worth of action and jokes here, crammed into a story so streamlined it might have been assembled in the Lockheed wind tunnel.
It also offers a fresh and arguably topical spin on its title character. Voiced again with gravelly self-importance by Will Arnett, here Batman is a spoilt hereditary-billionaire narcissist with a persecution complex, whose self-styled tough stance on law and order has kept Gotham mired in perpetual chaos.
Things change with the appointment of a new police commissioner, Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson), who immediately unveils a progressive criminal justice policy agenda that threatens to make the Caped Crusader redundant.
Then enter The Joker (Zach Galifianakis), who uses Batman’s subsequent Bat-huff to get one over on his age-old foe, largely because their goodiebaddie relationship’s ongoing lack of exclusivity, in a world not short on C-list evildoers, has started to hurt.
This sets the stage for a catastrophe the like of which it’s fair to say Gotham has never seen before.
Writers Seth GrahameSmith, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers have plumbed the Bat-catalogue for a host of lesser-known villains.
In fact, the whole film dives deep into Batman lore without ever losing its lightness. — The Telegraph