Batman: The Long Halloween, Part Two (2021)

The second half of this animated adaptation arrives with the grim efficiency of a mob accountant. Chris Palmer directs a Gotham City choking on Falcone money and Holiday murders, and the film keeps its attention where it belongs: on Harvey Dent's slow unraveling, on the vigilante's joyless pursuit, and on a city where every institution has already been bought. It is a noir procedural wearing a cape, and it wears it well enough. The animation is serviceable, the voice work committed, and the whole enterprise carries the faint melancholy of a story that knows how it ends and refuses to hurry toward it.

For the purposes of cultural classification, the ledger is nearly blank, and that is not a complaint. The voice cast places Latina performers in the roles of Catwoman and Renee Montoya, a bit of quiet representation the film never once announces, which is how such things ought to be handled. Catwoman remains a capable and prominent presence, though the screenplay has no interest in arguing with the patriarchy or in turning her into a thesis. Harvey Dent's psychological collapse is treated as tragedy and villain origin, not as a case study in neurological difference. The Falcone and Maroni operations are criminal enterprises, not metaphors for late capitalism. Nobody lectures. Nobody preaches. The climate goes unmentioned, because this is Gotham, and the sky is always the color of a bruise.

What remains is a moody, competent genre exercise, the sort of thing that used to be made without apology and now arrives with a content warning attached to its own existence. It has no interest in instructing its audience, and for that we can offer a small, tired nod of respect. The sommelier finds a dry, unpretentious vintage here, low in ideological tannins, best served cold and without commentary.