Batman: The Killing Joke

Shares the few weaknesses of the short comic it is based on, but adds a bunch of its own new weaknesses to try and get it up to a theatrical runtime and justify its cinema release.

I think part of the reason the reception for _The Killing Joke_ has been so overwhelmingly negative is that the expectations were so high going in. But that wasn't without cause. It sees the long awaited return of both Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill to their famed DC roles, and the comic it's based on is widely regarded as one of the better stories ever published by the company. And of these lofty expectations, _The Killing Joke_ falls short.

Hamill is great, and Kevin Conroy usually is as well. There are a couple of occasions that the latter slipped though. I don't know if he's rusty or just didn't care, but his voice performance is not 100%. The story essentially meets that of its source material, but rather than expand the existing story, they chose to awkwardly force an entirely different one in beforehand, to the point that this is essentially two episodes of two different shows, rather than a single cohesive movie.

_The Killing Joke_ is a little gross and is not the return to form for DC Animation that we all had hoped it would be, but the final sequence is fantastic and I don't know that the movie overall deserves quite as much vitriol as it has had.

_Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole._

OK, so I'll admit I was expecting something closer to the graphic novel, and I was pretty disappointed that it only really loosely followed something that was epicly brilliant as the comic.

However, I'm not a stickler for total accuracy.

And, really it is better than most of the other Batman movies, it does manage to tell a good story and reveal some of the Joker's ever-changing and never consistent backstory, even if it does gloss over a lot of it.

In the end, especially in this current era it's a reminder of how great comic books used to be and how great they could be again if they only started telling actual stories once more.

_The Killing Joke_ deserved a better adaptation. Not even that. Just re-edit this to cut out the first half and you have a perfect adaptation. This is one of my favorite Batman stories ever. Unfortunately, the first part is spent irrelevantly on Barbara, and has largely nothing to do with the rest of the movie. However, after about a half hour of filler, the ACTUAL adaptation of _The Killing Joke_ is awesome. Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill deliver another classic performance of Batman and Joker. Half of this movie I despise and half of this I love.

5/10