Director: Sam Liu
Voiced by: Kevin Conway, Melissa Rauch, Paget Brewster, Loren Lester, Kevin Michael Richardson.
I've never got round the watching the famed and acclaimed animated series of the 90's nor have I seen the Killing Joke feature length film, a movie that some praise so when I saw an opportunity to catch this on the big screen, I thought, what the heck.
It's a basic, acceptable premise of Batman hunting down and putting a stop to Poison Ivy and Floronic Man's plans of turning everything on Earth into a plant. Though, for our super-intelligent crime-fighting, caped-crusader and sidekick Nightwing, he can't seem to do anything without enlisting the help of Harley Quinn.
Quite naughty for an animated feature which reminds me that it's a 12a certificate. But even for a 12a it's very suggestive and open ended, even sexualising women to some degree. Regardless of the certificate, I thought this breached the norm for Batman becoming quite a perverted segment. It really lacks the seriousness of Batman and feels like it can't decide between being a cartoon for kids, which it clearly can't, or a decent Batman animation for the more mature audiences and sadly becomes neither.
Batman really takes a back seat here and instead the film is focused mostly on Harley Quinn, also, Batman isn't as heroic as what some might expect, almost, just almost being a parody of Batman. He actually gets his arse handed to him. It could get away with being titled Harley Quinn and Batman, or even better, Harley Quinn 4 Nightwig.
The animation reminded me of the Scooby Doos of the 70's/80's and I wasn't overly impressed. It looked cheap but some, not all of the action sequences were quite fluid. There seems to be quite a few unnecessary scenes, again, feeling incredibly immature for Batman fans. The karaoke bar for example was an utter joke. (though plenty of recognisable nods from the world of Batman)
Apart from a couple of decent animated action scenes, and Conway's and Lester's voices, I didn't think Rauch did a bad job of Harley Quinn, but the rest of the film is incredibly poor and even finishes badly. Like the creators gave up themselves. It's probably the worse thing I've seen of anything Batman orientated.
Running Time: 6
The Cast: 7
Performance: 7
Direction: 3
Story: 3
Script: 2
Creativity: 2
Soundtrack: 2
Job Description: 1
The Extra Bonus Point: - 10 for being the greatest misrepresentation of Batman from something officially Batman.
23% 2/10
