Well, that was a lot of fun. I thought Batman wasn't a very interesting character in THE LEGO MOVIE. And maybe he still isn't, but this movie does a good job of telling an exciting story while simultaneously mocking and deconstructing the superhero genre and the Batman mythology. It even references back to the 1940s miniseries (although too quickly for me to tell if it was the Lewis Wilson or Robert Lowery one.)
Batman was uninteresting in THE LEGO MOVIE because he's a one-joke character. Dark and brooding, he neither needs nor wants connection with anyone. Breaking that down and rebuilding him as a member of a bat-family is the whole point of THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE. It starts with him foiling and then insulting the Joker by telling him that he means nothing to him. Batman is the ultimate loner, he doesn't even value his arch-enemy. So Joker hatches his greatest plot--get banished to The Phantom Zone just so he can break out and bring all the worst villains with him. Batman has natural allies in his butler Alfred, (accidentally) adopted son Dick Grayson, and new police commissioner Barbara Gordon, but he has to get over his greatest fear--not clown snakes, but having a family he can lose--before he can win.
The jokes come rapid-fire, enough to make it worth watching again and Googling the more obscure ones (like all of Batman's minor villains.) Which makes the whole thing a lot of fun.
Running Time: 104 minutes
My Total Minutes: 419,532
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