Over the holidays, I took a little bit of time to watch the animated rendition of Batman: The Killing Joke, widely regarded as one of the most memorable Batman comics ever made. Despite curmudgeon Alan Moore’s best attempts to discount its merit, there’s no denying that it’s a genuine classic that puts an exclamation point on the dark undertones of the series, and shows a very serious and vicious rendition of The Joker and a storyline that distances it miles away from the safeness of The Animated Series and the campiness of the 60’s Adam West show.
When the film debuted over the summer during Comic-Con, there was a lot of buzz in the negative sense about its execution; something about an artificially added storyline, damaging of female empowerment, and a very non-canonical relationship. In other words, typical nerd outrage over something that a lot of people didn’t agree with. Although the details of these particular elements did sound a little suspect, I didn’t really want to come to any conclusions without seeing it myself; after all, with the return of Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy to reprise their TAS roles, maybe this could be an epic retelling of an epic comic story.
Well, after watching The Killing Joke, put me in the camp of comic nerds who believes it was overall crap.
Spoiler alert, but just about every criticism said about The Killing Joke was entirely warranted in my opinion, and my general mood after watching it was that I kind of felt like I had wasted my time.
The artificially inserted storyline involving Paris Franz (c’mon now) as an upstart gangster who develops a low-key obsession with Batgirl was one that was just that; artificially inserted. It felt like The Killing Joke was animated and produced, but critics and/or test audiences were dissatisfied with a 40 minute stand-alone special, so the creators pseudo-went back to the drawing board and whipped up the Paris Franz substory to shoe-horn into the film in order to fill time.
It accomplishes nothing in general Batman storylines and is completely non-cohesive to the primary storyline of The Killing Joke. Worse yet, it deconstructs the general fabric of the Batman universe by forcing the completely uncharacteristic and unnecessary Batgirl x Batman unrequited love storyline where they actually have sex before devolving into an uncomfortable and awkward change in relationship where Batman basically tries to ghost Batgirl. In the process, Barbara Gordon/Batgirl is deconstructed into a clingy stereotype of a jilted ex-girlfriend who acts out erratically, violently and defiantly.
The Killing Joke animated movie was the worst thing to happen to Batgirl since Yvonne Craig passed away.
And that’s even before she has her fateful encounter with The Joker.
As for the rest of the movie, y’know, the actual The Killing Joke storyline, it’s hard to say it’s not because it was preemptively tainted by the shitty Paris Franz artificial storyline, but it’s pretty bland. There was clearly a lot of attention paid to the original comic for how certain shots were laid out, but I would venture to say a little too much attention. Because at times, it literally felt like the comic was being read to me what with how they managed to verbatim portray just about every single iconic frame in the comic in the show, and since it was going from still comic to animated screen, it wasn’t like a revolutionary translation like The Walking Dead does it.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that there was nothing creative or groundbreaking by taking The Killing Joke comic book and making it into an animated movie. If anything at all, it was a paycheck for Mark Hamill, Kevin Conroy, Tara Strong and other voice talents, but it was definitely a case of mindlessly reading existing scripts as opposed to breathing life into characters and creating new and exciting content.
The only difference was that after reading the comic, I was awestruck by a great storyline, but after watching the film, I was kind of left feeling a little put off and that I had wasted some time. Would not recommend, would not eBay, F minus-minus-minus.
