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This family-oriented, circus-inflected arena show from ‘Warner Bros Consumer Products’ was never likely to capture the grit and moral ambiguity of Batman’s finest outings. But with a hefty budget and the benefit of a script from DC Comics alumnus Allan Heinberg, there was every reason to hope ‘Batman Live’ would combine spectacle with something of the Dark Knight’s brooding mystique.
Despite the money involved, it feels half-baked. Heinberg’s script is a formulaic trundle, sleepwalking through a U-rated take on familiar Batman and Robin origin stories before feebly engineering a confrontation between the Dynamic Duo and The Joker (plus some gratuitously lobbed-in other villains who don’t really do anything). The cast – particularly RSC veteran Nick Court’s Batman/Bruce Wayne – do a game job of declaiming the most mundane line as if it were of thunderous import, but there is little getting away from how lazy and vapid the storyline really is.
As a spectacle you’d expect ‘Batman Live’ to triumph, but it’s hardly mind-blowing. Jack Galloway’s costumes are spot on and there are a couple of superb set-pieces: Mark Frost’s Joker entering in a huge jack-in-the-box, and later a giant Joker head with features made of an army of goons. But there isn’t nearly enough of this sort of invention, and the highwire and aerial tricks are distinctly sub-Cirque du Soleil. The fight sequences, in particular, are unforgivably limp, about as visceral as a nice lie down.