Batman: The Killing Joke Is An Absolute Disaster.

Mark Hamill is a great Joker, but…

When one talks about the films based on the DC Universe, it can often provoke a divisive reaction. My favorite hero from that IP is arguably Batman, so imagine my interest when I hear that The Killing Joke is being turned into an animated movie. I haven’t been keeping up with DC Animated movies all that much, so I thought it’d be interesting to jump back in and see what Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill have been doing outside of the excellent Arkham games.

I am sad to say that I kind of regret watching it. Do you want to know why?

We Did Not Need To Watch The First Thirty To Forty Minutes Of This Movie!

Tara Strong did a nice job as Batgirl, but…

The Killing Joke‘s basic premise is centered around the origin and psychological motivation of the Joker. I’ve never read the comic, so imagine my surprise when the first half of this film is centered around Batgirl and has nothing to do with the Clown Prince of Crime. Now, that would be fine if it was compelling and built up to something, but it was perhaps the dumbest story idea to come out of the DC brand since Batman and Robin. The reasons are numerous, but simplistic.

First, I think it utterly destroys the character of Barbara Gordon. In this story, she doesn’t seem like a trained vigilante that is ready and waiting to kick criminal ass. She is impulsive, goes into situations with no backup, and can’t seem to realize when she is being led into an ambush. After repeatedly telling her to stand down and coming to her rescue, Batman takes her off the case…

…and then they have sex on a Gotham rooftop after fighting one another.

So, I guess that’s a thing now? It was probably alluded to in the comics and other stories, but you can’t get away with that in a film or television show. There has to be some kind of set-up to explain the development of a romance, such as how Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle often date in the stories.

And to top it off, the first half is driven by the most uninteresting villain I’ve seen in ages: a mobster who goes by the name of Paris Franz. I did not care about this antagonist in the slightest. To make matters worse, the script writers gave him a bizarre and laughable obsession with Batgirl that culminates in maximum cringe, such as when he says stuff like how “It must be that time of the month.”

Now, I may be just a guy on the Internet who writes a lot, but even I could come up with less cliched insults than that!

When You Get To The Actual Source Material, It Doesn’t Recover.

This should be a creepy image, but…

The Killing Joke is often called one of the greatest Batman stories of all time. I officially have no idea why that is apart from the creation of Oracle. The origin of the Joker and the ensuing plot is, pardon the pun, laughable. To explain this in further detail, I’ll separate the two pieces of the story and go at them individually.

The supposed origin story of the Joker is that he was a lab assistant, but he wanted to be a stand-up comedian. However, no one considered him to be funny, so he had to turn to crime to make ends meet. He ends up falling into a vat of chemicals and goes insane as a result, which leads to the persona that we know.

I know that this is an attempt to make us feel bad for the guy, but it falls flat on its’ face because the Joker is defined as an unreliable narrator. This undermines the premise of the story and can make one question why they couldn’t just develop a way to flush the chemicals out of his system.

Anyway, the overarching premise is that one bad day can be enough to drive an ordinary man insane. It would have been fine for a psychological or action thriller, but it’s difficult to take it seriously when Batman is fighting off half the carnival freak show. On top of that, we know that his argument isn’t worth anything because it isn’t grounded in reality. Batman didn’t go crazy, Commissioner Gordon didn’t go crazy, and 99.999% people in the real world don’t go insane and become mass murderers after the death of a spouse.

The Ending.

That’s right, Batman. You take him throwing plates at you before you take him down!

The biggest issue with the story is arguably the ending. To put it simply, Commissioner Gordon wants the Joker brought in by-the-book to set an example that the law can work. Now, that is a fine idea and not my main issue with the story. The main problems come when Batman enters the funhouse and all the tension gets sucked out of the story. And hell, there’s even a musical number somewhere in there to make things even dumber.

But that’s not the strangest part.

I am aware that the comic ended the same way that the movie did, but it lets all of the tension out of the confrontation between these two arch-nemeses. A better ending would have been to just send him back to Arkham in cuffs, even if it’s a little bit boring from a creativity perspective.

Conclusion.

Wait, how did he get here?!

You’re better off watching The Dark Knight. Batman: The Killing Joke is an example of lousy source material being adapted with an all-star cast that can’t even save it from ruin. It wastes too much time, fails to explore the characters adequately, and has a plot that doesn’t make much sense if you think about it for more than a few minutes.

I don’t know about you, but I expect better from my entertainment, animated or not.