Batman Ninja (2018) – Of late, DC have been killing it on their animated offerings, and Batman Ninja is perhaps the weirdest of their successes. The premise is precariously unstable, relocating Batman and his greatest foes to feudal Japan, and yet the film’s creators stick the landing by embracing that manic wildness and careening between set pieces that alternate mad action with eccentric animation choices. I can’t overstate how bonkers Batman Ninja is, with concepts like Gorilla Grodd’s time machine, Robin’s unacknowledged adoption of a monkey sidekick, and a clan of ninja dedicated to the prophecy of the Bat; that’s even before Bane shows up as a sumo wrestler while the other villains build castles that turn into mechanized warriors. In the middle of all this madness is Batman (Roger Craig Smith), who delivers with an impossibly straight face lines like, “Our weapons will be everything that exists.” His level deadpan is matched by Tony Hale’s madcap Joker, who outdoes Buster Bluth’s mood swings by a mile. Watching Batman Ninja, I could not help but think of Mad Max: Fury Road, which I took to task for a similar meandering plotlessness and overemphasis on action sequences dialed up to eleven. Was the difference, then, only that Batman Ninja wore a Batsuit to appease my biases as a comic book shill? Perhaps, but a key distinction is that no two scenes in Batman Ninja are alike; compare Batman’s duel with Joker to the meditative storybook quality of the sequence in which Jason Todd finds an apparently reformed Joker and Harley Quinn (Tara Strong). Fury Road was a two-hour car chase; Batman Ninja is eighty-five unpredictable minutes in which a change in tone, pace, and energy is usually only a few minutes away.
It (2017) – Stephen King adaptations have a hit-or-miss reputation, usually skewing more successfully toward his less supernatural stories (cf. The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile). I read It at an impressionable age, perhaps around fourteen or so, and vividly recall it as one of the most terrifying novels I’ve ever read. (Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon is up there, too.) I’ve not seen the original miniseries, starring Tim Curry, but I found director Andy Muschetti’s adaptation wholly successful, unsettling in all the right places and bloody terrifying in the rest. Muschetti has the unenviable task of directing a cast of children, which includes Jaeden Lieberher, Sophia Lillis, and Finn Wolfhard. Unlike many child performers, however, the cast of It are remarkably gifted, lacking that trying-too-hard aura that might have plagued another production. The kids all have striking eccentricities that give their performers something to embrace; Lieberher, for one, is adept at giving his Bill Denbrough a stutter, while Jack Dylan Grazer balances comic relief with crippling panic as the hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak. Of course, no one comes to It without wanting to talk about Pennywise the Clown, and on this count Bill Skarsgård is really frightening. Jump scares aside, Skarsgård’s Pennywise is this perpetually hungry, partly childlike specter of menace whose savage teeth and yellow eyes belie a physicality that could snap at any moment. From clips, I sense that Tim Curry’s original Pennywise casts something of a long shadow, and Skarsgård has mostly stepped out of that shadow; though the voice feels similar in places, Skarsgård substitutes Curry’s guttural rasp for pitch variances that recall Heath Ledger’s Joker. I admit that I am always skeptical when a novel is broken into parts for multiple films, but It strikes a good chord by consolidating the novel’s “past” segments into one story that doesn’t require you to come back for more. I am, however, more intrigued by It: Chapter Two having seen what a knockout horror film It ended up being.That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!
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