Son of Batman (2014)
– Batman’s back, and this time he’s a daddy.
Jason O’Mara returns from his debut in Justice League: War for his
first meeting with his son Damian (Stuart Allan). O’Mara’s Batman is not as gruff as the
quintessential Kevin Conroy, but he’s somewhere between Liam Neeson and
Harrison Ford – a fine heir to the throne, for my money. (Conroy will be back in Assault on Arkham.) More
inspired casting comes in the form of Giancarlo Esposito as Ra’s al Ghul and
Morena Baccarin as his daughter Talia.
Though the film doesn’t use these characters as much as I would have
liked, their inclusion leads me to believe that DC is searching out new top
talent – and if there’s one thing we know about the al Ghuls, it’s their
penchant for resurrection. At the end of
the day, it’s a Batman film, and so for that reason I’m inclined to review it
positively; I don’t begrudge Warner Bros. the seventy-some minutes of my life,
and I even tend to give movies like this a bit of leeway. But my honest assessment is that Son of Batman does strip its source
material – Grant Morrison’s Batman and
Son – of some of its teeth. The original
plot had Damian introduced amid his mother’s bid for “a new kind of terror,”
while here Talia is reduced to a damsel in distress in favor of a focus on
antagonist Deathstroke – who, between this, Arrow,
and a slew of video games, may be a bit overplayed at this point. (An eleventh-hour twist putting Talia in the mastermind’s
seat would have been welcome.) The
dynamic between Batman and Damian, however, is note-perfect from the original
comics, capturing the fun sense of the latest major addition, his spirited and
surly son, to the Batman mythos.That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!
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