Batman: Knightfall–Part 1: Knightfall | Duration: 78 minutes
Bruce Wayne (Anson Mount) is struggling in the wake of losing Dick Grayson as his Robin and then his replacement to the Joker’s crowbar. While Alfred (Simon Templeman) pushes him to therapy, he finds a project in Jean-Paul Valley (Pablo Schreiber), a damaged and abused young man brainwashed into becoming the dangerous avenging angel Azrael. There’s no time to rest on the Bataurels, though, when a huge explosion rips through Arkham Asylum, freeing the inmates Batman has spent years incarcerating. It’s almost like, as the Riddler (David Dastmalchian) suspects, there’s some kind of grand plan at work. Indeed there is. A hulking presence with a lifetime of resentment has moved into town. The venom-powered master strategist Bane (Michael Mando) has a broken Bat in his sights.
Warner Bros. Animation finally brings the epic two-year Knightfall saga to film, suitably following the three-part structure it inherited from the hugely successful Death of Superman event. Before Gotham has to cope without a Batman, or witness his all-encompassing return, the darkest and most attractive part for us bat-sadists has to happen. Batman has to it the floor like never before.
It’s the storyline that inspired the, sorry, spine of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Rises, as Bane assaults and takes control of Gotham City, but the animation is far more faithful to the page.
It’s a wise decision to play it nice and brief with the Azrael side-story. As important as the character will become, the film leaves us with all we need. A prologue has the avenging angel with his flaming gauntlet blades massacring some ne’erdowells at the Gotham docklands. Their faces are burned off, and many are chopped in two (yes, this is a defiantly adult take on the brutal storyline) before Batman intervenes. Later we catch up with the young man being deconditioned in the Batcave, brought into Wayne’s confidence and given another chance. What if his incredible abilities could be used for good?
Bane gets a longer, darker origin. We spend a considerable amount of time with him during years of abuse at Peña Duro Prison in Santa Prisca, from birth to experimentation. It’s an impressively staged section, and doesn’t shy away from dark areas. Unfairly punished for the sins of his father, his first murder is a paedophile predator, for which Bane earns an impossible punishment and somehow survives.
The meat and bones of this circle down into Hell (this is Batman’s Inferno) is in the punching. Bane’s plan is so good it’s a marvel no one had come up with it before–but then the deceptively dressed Mexican wrestler of smackdowns is fixated on the weakness that Batman’s allowed to propagate through the city since the death of his strong father; Thomas Wayne was the subject of the magazine that was Bane’s only reading, and obsession, during his years of torture. His solution is simple and effective: Blow up Arkham, tire the Dark Knight out, then take him out.
The montage of Batman’s endless struggle to get the city back under control is effective, even if it doesn’t have the time the comic books did to dwell on a Dark Knight running on empty. The animation, though, is uniformly excellent. A starring role is handed to Mad Hatter (voiced by Jason Flemyng), with his mind-controlled goons already showing Batman’s not on top form. A venomised Riddler (David Dastmalchian) stalking the Gotham clock tower is distracting. Mr Freeze later appears as a startlingly scary, shadowy golem, while Scarecrow manifests as the ghost of Jason Todd to taunt the fast unravelling caped crusader. There’s a brief but appreciated cameo for the Ventriloquist and Scarface too, the doll gaining a life of its own, a simple example of Batman’s breaking mind.
Emboldened by his time commanding a starship in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Anson Mount takes on the cowl, serving up a pretty good Batman at the end of his tether (although early therapy, the calm before the storm, allows him to loosen up as Bruce Wayne). In this environment, struggling to cope and losing control, he’s shouty (firing Tim Drake’s Robin after a dangerous bit of deduction (he may never be the detective Batman is, but he’s going to give him a run for his money) and suffering (he has to break).
Opposite Mount, Michael Mando is the real revelation as Bane. We meet the character as a boy, but it’s when he reaches fruition–the mind sharp, the prison seized, the revenge plotted and suit on–that he is a menacing giant. Seriously, this Bane is huge, but it all sets the right tone alongside the constant R-rated gore and violence. Mando’s calm menace, growling some fine dialogue, makes him one of the most effective versions of the character to grace the screen.
It’s the police that set up the next chapter of this story. Jessica Camacho’s Montoya has her doubts about Batman, especially after seeing him beat a live Mr Zsasz to a pulp. But it’s fully realised in the white-haired Commissioner Gordon (Bruce Boxleitner) when he states that if Batman’s gone, Gotham has already fallen.
Bane’s breaking of Batman in Wayne Manor reaches an incredible climax when the hulking villain reveals himself atop the burning GCPD. Throwing his prey into a police light, the twisted body casting a cracked glass and mortifying Bat-signal onto the Gotham clouds, we’re beyond Batmetaphors. Knightfall–Part 1 is an engrossing, brilliantly realised, brutal take that feels suitably harsher today than it did in the 1990s. Bring on the Knightquest, and it’s a less clunky title.
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