I must be the only one who didn't particularly like it...

... I like the idea of Batman going into retirement and having to return a decade later to save Gotham one last time. I just don't think the execution of that idea was that good. The action scenes seemed disjointed, jumping from one to the next without notice. I often found myself looking down at my watch to see when this would be over.

The illustrations worked well sometimes, but not all the time (I didn't like the way Fatman looked in some sequences, and the problem was not so much his physique, but the Batsuit). I'm all up for realism and showing that time passes for everyone, including the people of Gotham, but did they really have to make half the characters fat? Growing old is not necessarily synonymous with becoming fat! Batman, Lana Lang, Selina Kyle... It was just weird seeing some of these characters morbidly obese.

I didn't really like the main villains in this (especially Part 1), the mutants, either. They just felt like a parody of Marvel's X-Man Cyclops. They didn't seem all that menacing. I think it would have been cooler to have Killer Croc as the mutant leader and have the mutant followers with deformities and self-inflicted wounds/battle scars. A bunch of punks with red visors were simply not frightening.

Another major point of contention is the level of absurdity in this, which goes through the roof. Batman gets repeatedly shot, stabbed, injured in every way imaginable, and gets right back into the fight moments later. He even goes horseback through Gotham after getting knifed by the Joker and shot by half of GCPD (they admittedly have terrible aim in this). Talking about the Joker: Gets a Batarang in the eye; doesn't react; calls Batman insane instead. Then there's pseudo-Robin and everything she does, which I won't even bother going into.

And then there's the newscasters' segments, which were a bit hit-and-miss and didn't really work for me half the time. I did like the satire of liberals (Carrie Kelley's parents) and conservatives (the President of the U.S.A.), though. I thought it was amusing. I didn't like the whole Cold War sub-plot, which was distracting most of the time, but at least it culminated in an epic battle between Bats and Sups. I also generally liked the voice acting, which was quite good across the board.

But that's it really. I realise this animated film stays faithful to the comic, which limits how much I can criticise it. Maybe I should be criticising the source material instead. In any case, I can't really give this two-part animated film more than a...

6/10