As Batman hunts for the escaped Joker, the Clown Prince of Crime attacks the Gordon family to prove a diabolical point mirroring his own fall into madness. Based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore...
When I first heard DC/Warner Bros would finally give us a feature-length movie of Alan Moore's classic graphic novel "The Killing Joke," I immediately ran around town much like George Bailey did in It's A Wonderful Life when he had come back to life. It was the greatest news since, well, it was just awesome news. I later found out that Fathom Events would release the movie in theaters across the nation for one night only and that joy multiplied. I put out a Facebook event invite to gather friends to join me for that special one night screening. They day of the screening came and several people met at my home for dinner before heading out to the theater. It was an event.
We arrived at the theater and we were surrounded by Batman fans. It was a happy moment. We were seated and everyone around talked about how great the graphic novel is and that we were excited about seeing it. The theater lights were dimmed, the special intro was showed, and then...
the movie started.
Ten minutes. 15 minutes. 20 minutes. 30 minutes passed. Where was The Killing Joke? What I was seeing was not the movie I paid to see. What we were watching instead was the very annoying story of Batgirl/Barbara Gordon moping and whining to Batman because she wasn't being taken serious. She was moping to her 90's-gay-stereotype of a friend about having "boy troubles." There was also a massive "wtf" moment with Batman.
Then, after all that, what seemed like The Killing Joke finally started. What I remembered reading in Alan Moore's classic graphic novel started to happen on screen. But by then, it was too late. I was so thrown back about the first half of the movie, that I didn't even care for what I was seeing on screen.
Don't get me wrong, once the actual Killing Joke portion started, it was true to the novel. But as I said, it was too late for me and I had given up. I'm no rookie here when it comes to adaptations so I am fully aware that certain liberties must be taken in order to have the movie version flow better. But what they decided to do with these liberties was atrocious. If they were going to add things in order to lengthen the film's running time, then why not expand on the character of Jim Gordon? The whole thing with Batgirl was so pointless, it did absolutely nothing to add to the motivation of any of these characters.
The animation was second-rate. For a moment, I thought I was watching an unfinished product. I said, "Is this an unfinished version that still needs to be sent to the artists to go over?"
While the voice actors were great (and believe me. It was awesome hearing Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as the Joker) but the animation was so bad that it didn't fit was I was hearing. Its as though the voices were actually recorded for a different movie and this was fan-made.
Shame on you, DC. Shame on you for giving us such a poor version of what we waited a long time to see on the big screen. Shame on you for taking such a beautiful graphic novel and doing such a poor job with it, you may as well just film the producers holding up a middle finger to the audience. Actually, now that I think about it, that would've been better than what I saw that night on the big screen.
I've been told I'm not a real Batman fan for hating this movie. On the contrary, its because I'm such a huge Batman fan that I hated this movie.
