The LEGO Bat­man Movie

In 2014, The LEGO Movie unapolo­get­i­cal­ly attempt­ed to please both kids and their par­ents with a human­is­tic sto­ry filled with pop cul­ture ref­er­ences and cute songs. In doing exact­ly what it says on the tin, The LEGO Bat­man Movie repeats the trick, only with even more allu­sions to com­ic books and movie culture.

What’s most sur­pris­ing about the way the film sets about skew­er­ing ear­li­er Bat­man movies is the pre­cise and mer­ci­less nature with which it does so. Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) calls those films ​“phas­es”, and sev­er­al icon­ic moments in the character’s on-screen his­to­ry are recre­at­ed shot for shot. More acces­si­ble jokes also land, and the film will sure­ly appeal to younger view­ers raised on a strict diet of super­hero block­busters – before shoot­ing at his ene­mies from his Bat­mo­bile, the Dark Knight (Will Arnett) instructs ​“com­put­er, over­com­pen­sate” and the blast is phe­nom­e­nal (though still, nat­u­ral­ly and amus­ing­ly, com­prised entire­ly of LEGO bricks).

But sub­vert­ing tropes through meta humour comes with its own risks. In an awk­ward bid to poke fun at its own ten­den­cy towards exces­sive ref­er­enc­ing, the film intro­duces an inten­tion­al­ly ridicu­lous num­ber of vil­lains from count­less uni­vers­es to help The Jok­er (Zach Gal­i­fi­anakis) fight Bat­man, from Volde­mort to the Eye of Sauron. Not only does their pres­ence desta­bilise the dynam­ic between the main char­ac­ters, it also feels like a des­per­ate effort to cater to a cer­tain audi­ence demo­graph­ic. It’s a messy mix that might just end up con­fus­ing them.

Nev­er­the­less, the sto­ry cen­tres on Bat­man once again con­fronting his arch neme­sis. This would almost cer­tain­ly evoke feel­ings of déjà vu were it not for the tru­ly orig­i­nal approach tak­en by writ­ers Seth Gra­hame-Smith, Chris McKen­na and Erik Som­mers. What makes this ver­sion of events seem fresh is the way it’s framed like an unre­quit­ed love-hate sto­ry. This clever nar­ra­tive twist sees the Bat­man-Jok­er dynam­ic play out in sim­ple rom-com terms, amus­ing­ly decon­struct­ing the seri­ous pow­er strug­gle that Christo­pher Nolan’s Dark Knight tril­o­gy worked so hard to build. The Jok­er sim­ply needs Bat­man to hate him like he hates him.

Even more curi­ous is the homo­eroti­cism that emerges from the char­ac­ters’ dis­dain-fuelled liai­son. A slow zoom in on the Joker’s crum­bling face when his long-term ene­my says their rela­tion­ship is one-sided empha­sis­es his heart­break. It’s hilar­i­ous, of course, but also some­what poignant: this cou­ple is vital to both the Bat­man uni­verse and pop­u­lar cul­ture – not to men­tion the lives of so many view­ers who have grown up with these char­ac­ters. How­ev­er deep or shal­low your fond­ness for Bat­man is, the under­ly­ing ten­der­ness of the Joker’s appar­ent hatred feels like a breath of fresh air after the dark, graph­ic, hyper-mas­cu­line rep­re­sen­ta­tions of recent Bat­man films.

Even women play a key role. Not only is Gotham’s may­or a woman (Mari­ah Carey), but Bar­bara Gor­don (Rosario Daw­son) is also revealed to be much more than Batman’s poten­tial love inter­est. Her slow-motion intro­duc­tion high­lights her beau­ty in clas­sic Hol­ly­wood style, but she soon demon­strates her tal­ents as a detec­tive, lead­ing to her inher­it­ing her father’s role as police com­mis­sion­er. Let’s hope that any chil­dren watch­ing will come to expect their hero­ines to always be ful­ly realised char­ac­ters, and will accept that their favourite heroes might just secret­ly love each other.