I’ve followed the Warner Brothers’ DC animated slate for years, and a handful of them sit in my personal hall of fame. This one earns a spot.
It doesn’t start perfectly. The Bane backstory sprints through material that needed room to breathe. We get his mother, we get the place they were living, but never how they ended up there or what she actually meant to him day to day. A few more minutes would have paid for themselves. That’s my one real complaint.
After that, it moves. The film wastes no time showing how Bane becomes Bane, and fair warning: the violence is comic book brutality at full volume. Not for the squeamish. That’s exactly why I love it. It commits.
The tension is what got me. This isn’t a movie that hands you an exhausted Batman and expects you to nod along. It builds that exhaustion brick by brick, so by the time he’s running on fumes you feel every hour he’s been awake. That patience is the whole game.
The design work is a treat. This take on Batman looks fantastic, and even the Batmobile is a fresh rendition that had me grinning. Azrael turns up and I’m genuinely curious where they take him.
And yes, I spent the runtime wondering whether we’d get the moment. The infamous one. We do, and I’ll say nothing beyond this: the film earns the right to show it. It never plays like fan service.
If you follow these animated movies at all, this is a must watch.
See Batman: Knightfall Part 1: Knightfall on TMDB
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