Batman: The Killing Joke (2016)

Let me be straight with you: Alan Moore's The Killing Joke is one of the most psychologically rich, visually audacious, morally uncomfortable stories ever told in the Batman canon. So when an animated adaptation landed with an R rating and a promise of fidelity to the source material, I was genuinely excited. What I got instead was something that squanders more than it delivers, and the reasons why are almost entirely self-inflicted.

The single worst decision this film makes, and it's a catastrophic one, is the fabricated prologue. Roughly a third of the running time is devoted to a Barbara Gordon storyline and, worse, a romantic subplot between her and Batman that exists nowhere in Moore's original graphic novel. It doesn't just feel tacked on. It actively damages the story that follows. Barbara deserves better than being defined by a romance before she's brutalised. The prologue was clearly introduced to give her more agency, but it ironically strips her of dignity in a different way entirely. It's tonally all over the place, and every minute spent on it is a minute stolen from the psychological showdown the film was supposed to be built around.

Which makes it all the more frustrating, because when the film finally gets to the meat of Moore's story, there are genuine flashes of what this could have been. The Joker's origin flashbacks are genuinely affecting, carrying the weight of tragedy and horror in roughly the right measure. And then there's Mark Hamill. I'll say it plainly: he's magnificent. His Joker is chilling and darkly poetic, a voice performance that reminds you why he's spent decades being considered the definitive take on the character. Kevin Conroy brings a tired, haunted quality to Batman that suits the tone well. These two are doing the heavy lifting, and you feel their absence in every scene they're not in.

The animation has its moments too. The nightmare sequences carry something of the surreal dread that made the source material so unsettling, and there's a visual boldness in those passages that I wish had infected the rest of the film. Thinking about how something like Fantastic Planet uses animation as a vehicle for genuine psychological unease, you can see what a dark, ambitious animated Batman story might have looked like if the filmmakers had been braver.

But brave is exactly what this isn't. The infamous attack on Barbara Gordon, one of the most controversial and discussed moments in all of comics history, is handled competently enough on screen. It's not botched. But the aftermath is where the film falls apart. There's no emotional depth to it, no sustained reckoning with what's happened. It becomes just another story beat rather than the gut-punch it needs to be. For a film with an R rating, it's oddly sanitised in spirit, even when it isn't in content.

The second half rushes through material that demands room to breathe. The philosophical confrontation between Batman and the Joker, the whole argument about whether one bad day can break anyone, the question of what separates them, it's all there, but compressed and flattened. You feel the story being told rather than experienced. That's the difference between adaptation and transcription, and this film mostly opts for the latter.

Three stars. Hamill alone is worth your time, and there are sequences that genuinely work. But this is a case where the choices made around the source material expose a lack of confidence in it. If you trust what you're adapting, you don't pad it out with invented subplots. You don't rush the ending. You don't play it safe with a story whose whole point is that it isn't.

A decent watch for fans, particularly for those performances. But as an adaptation of one of the darkest and most influential stories in Batman's history, it falls well short of what it should have been.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2016  | Watched: 2025-10-05

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