Starring: Will Friedle, Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Angie Harmon, and Melissa Joan HartMany animated Batman fans have been dying to get at this movie because of the answers it would provide. Answers about what happened to Dick Grayson and Tim Drake, and the Joker. But what several people are forgetting is that this is not supposed to be a movie about the original Batman - it's called Batman Beyond for a reason.
The creators of this futuristic Batman dared to experiment with how to make Batman new, and their product became a new Batman. That means new villains, new allies. Perhaps the most concrete way to baptize this Batman of the future is to make him face the legendary foe of the Dark Knight...the Joker.
The return of Senor Smiley isn't something to write home to Ma and Pa Kent about. He claims he was a genius before his time in microcircuitry, genetics, and whatever other multiple-degree programs he never achieved. So he encodes his memory engrams onto a microchip, which ends up on the back of Tim Drake's neck, enabling a Jekyll/Hyde transformation every now and then. Now, Timmy grows up and gets married, and somehow, this microchip never gets seen by his wife. Or maybe it only shows up whenever the Joker's around, so that the new Batman has a convenient target.
Resurrection is never fun, unless you have an orbiting particle beam satellite to command. Now, I've had particle beam issues with a comic before, and this one is along those laser-guided lines. The Joker can level a city, because the satellite is under his control. So...? Batman flies around safely in his hovering Batmobile, while the particle beam carves up Gotham like Mr. Zsasz in a shopping mall. Apparently, Batman's too busy saving his own enhanced hide to worry about the thousands of people who were just killed instantaneously, in the particle beam's wake. He lets it happen again later, while engaging in some fisticuffs with the Big J.
It's not just Terry who's out of character, but Bruce, too. The Joker returns, and whether Bruce thinks it's the real deal or not, what's his order to Terry? "Give me back the suit." Okay, so he's worried about Mr. McGinnis' welfare. Let's let Terry live, and have Batman fade away so that a day later, the Joker can just obliterate every human in Gotham with his spanky satellite.
I've read several comments about the movie, and they pretty much revolve around the cuts made to it as a result of editing, and how much better the movie would be, if those scenes or bits of dialogue were left in. No one seems to be focusing on the inadequacy of the story. Yes, some loose ends from the original series are tied up, and there's a few injokes, but you need a plot that respects each character, which is something Return Of The Joker does not appear to do.
While they were making all these cuts, could they not have fixed some of the simpler things, like "exectutive", twice in the opening credits?
Some elements of Terry's life thankfully arrive. We get one moment with his mother and brother, and a scene where he attempts to rescue Dana in a disco. The rest of the movie revolves around things from the past animated series, instead of trying to craft a tale that centres around Terry. Batman Beyond has always melded the Wayne/McGinnis pairing so that the younger of the two can learn from experience. How can he learn, if he just exists, so that the characters with more history get to tell their stories?
Return Of The Joker has no lasting effects on Terry as Batman. His girlfriend gets injured, but not seriously. His mentor gets injured, but he comes back. Everything's status quo. In Batman: Mask Of The Phantasm, where the past was revisited, there was serious loss - of the human soul, of love revisited, of hope. Same thing in Batman: Subzero. Mr. Freeze's wife became his purpose, but he lost her again, along with his humanity.
If Bruce died, there might have been an active purpose behind what Terry does as Batman. It would not only be partly vengeance, but a true rebirth of the legacy, allowing Terry to make the same mistakes Bruce did, when he first started out as Batman - alone. His character cannot evolve, if it continues to be suffocated by an overbearing protector. As both he and Mr. Wayne agreed, Terry fulfilled the role of Batman in answer to his father's murder, but that work has been over for a while. He doesn't have a motive for continuing as the Dark Knight. Especially when he can allow a particle beam to level what is now his city.
