Well, that was dumb.

I had faint hopes that writer-director Matt Reeves, who did some interesting things with the Planet of the Apes reboot, might find a fresh, consistently worked-out angle on The Batman. But I was disappointed. That is, for nearly three slogging hours, I was disappointed.

“Overlong and underlit” is the leading critic’s joke going around, but the midnight-in-the-alley look of The Batman was okay if unremarkable. There was big talk about this movie being modeled on film noir, a genre that at its darkest and most powerful represented modern society as an existential hell from which there was no escape. But really, The Batman doesn’t go much further into noir than rainy night scenes and angsty poses. It wallows around in Gotham’s supposedly limitless depravity for a while then takes it back in the end.