MovieChat Forums > The Batman (2022) Discussion > Paul Dano was laughably bad

Paul Dano was laughably bad


The character ticked practically every movie serial killer cliche in the book. Innocent, dweeby-looking appearance? Check. Soft spoken, childlike voice? Check. Uncontrollable fits of joy and laughter upon causing chaos? Check. A motive stemming from revenge at an unjust society where the people he kills somehow "deserves" it? Check.

And on top of that, Paul Dano was just laughably terrible in the role. How anyone can say he's the perfect successor to Heath Ledger's Joker just eludes me. He was so over-the-top and cartoonish to the point that I almost started laughing in certain scenes.

The movie sucked as a whole too, but Dano was the icing on a cake made of shit and piss.

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It's meant to be a take on incels and 4chan.

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I thought he was a joke. I couldn't take him seriously. The people around me though really thought he was creepy. I think it was playing into their fear of the recluse white man in a successful way. It got even more ludicrous in the final act. They went so hard on stoking the fears of gun violence and dark web chat rooms it was hard not to see the entire film as a propaganda tool to further dismantle our civil liberties. But Dano's performance in particular did not connect with me. You'll find something more disturbing on any number of episodes of Criminal Minds. For a hot minute, I thought they were going to do something edgy and tackle some conspiracy theory on what really happened with the Las Vegas mass shooting. But they did not.

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One of a few things that bothered me about this movie was the propaganda angle. On top of what you already mentioned with dark web chatrooms and that whole dangerous loners narrative, I couldn't help but notice the racial bias in all the roles. With the obvious exception of Batman himself (and by extension Alfred) every virtuous character in this film was a minority, and every corrupt figure was a white man. Catwoman even points it out at one point, about bringing down all the corrupt white men, like race should have anything to do with it. In the movie everyone is basically corrupt except for the black Gordon, the plucky black new mayor, and the 'shades of grey' Catwoman. EVERY bad guy was a white man, even the new thug in over his head at the start of the movie was black, it was impossible not to notice.
That, along with the frustratingly invincible Batman, the tacked-on third act, and the lame Bruce Wayne (though admittedly great Batman) has me thinking less and less of this movie the more I think about it.

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Current year society is wrestling with history. Painting what was with an ugly brush to prop up new shit. I get it. It gets even messier when you mix in money. My theater showing was filled with black folks. Batman fans? New movie fans? Black actor fans? Who knows. Ultimately, I really liked what this movie had to say. A Batman finding himself and realizing fear isn't the answer and that he needed to become a symbol for people. Solid superhero stuff. It was just so damn dull.

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I agree that it was a good note for Bruce's character to end on, but I felt like I never saw the moment when Batman had this epiphany to himself. It felt like it was just spoken at the very end, without it really having been shown by the character's actions. Without that ending narration, I would've never come to the conclusion myself that Bruce went on a character journey in this movie.

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You just nailed my problem. I didn't know what was bugging me. But it TOLD without SHOWING. It was cheap.

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I mean if the shoe fits. who are the ones doing all the mass school and church and mall shootings. who are 80% of American serial killers

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Black mass shootings tend to get swept under the carpet as far as the collective consciousness is concerned, which is why you think this. In the U.S., blacks are 12.4% of the population (based on 2020 data) and commit approximately 21% of mass shootings (based on 1982 - 2022 data). Whites are 57.8% of the population and commit 66% of mass shootings. While both races disproportionately commit mass shootings, blacks do so to a significantly higher degree.

Both whites and blacks also disproportionately engage in serial killing, although whites indeed do so at a proportionally higher rate.

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Do you have sources?

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You should probably just look it up yourself. U.S. population data should be simple enough, but the mass shooting data is subject to interpretation, mostly due to the definition (usually 3 - 4 people shot) and the snapshot of data (1982 - 2022 data will probably be slightly different from, say, 2021 data).

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you have the burden of proof. provide it

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You initiated a seemingly inaccurate claim without sources. Why don't you perform cursory research using sources of your choosing to determine whether that claim is congruent with reality? As I stated above, there is inherently going to be data variance so arguing over sources is a waste of my time.

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https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/hunting-humans-encyclopedia-modern-serial-killers

"82 percent of American serial killers were white"



https://politicalresearch.org/2014/06/19/mass-shooters-have-a-gender-and-a-race


Mass shootings by race arent tracked by a single agency who aggregate data. but someone else did

" reveal that most school shooters are White males, with 97 percent being male and 79 percent White. Over the last three decades, 90 percent of high school or elementary school shootings were the result of White, often upper-middle class, perpetrators. "

https://davinasquirrel.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/school-shootings/

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I found sources, but they have different numbers, which is why I asked you for yours.

Statista.com has it as 66 shootings by whites, 21 by African-Americans. Those are your numbers, but you said they were percentages, not numbers of shootings. The percentages are 52% white shooters and 16% African-American shooters. These are 2022 data.

US Census data have whites at 76.3% of the population and African-descent alone (i.e. not mixed race) at 13.4%. Two or more races is 2.8%. So, if that last stat bumps black-identified shooters (i.e. somebody who is said to be "black" even with mixed-race ancestry) by 1%, that brings them within a couple percentage points of their representative population.

Whites not counting Latino or Hispanic populations is 60.1%, too, so that compared to a 52% shooting stat makes European-descended persons only slightly underrepresented among shooters.

Statista was rated by mediabiasfactcheck.com in the "least biased" category with a high rating for factual accuracy.

I wanted you to cite your sources because you have different numbers and because I like to know where people are coming from. A lot of people cite stats from dubious sources, or from a vague, half-remembered realm of, "Somebody said..." and I'm not saying they're wrongly remembered, just that I'm a bit more skeptical when somebody's source is the Ubiquitous Them.

Furthermore, I think it's important to back up one's own data and not put the burden of proof for one's own arguments on other people.

You gave facts, I just want to know where they come from.

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any shooting of more than 3 (or four) people I believe is a "mass shooting".

notice how I was specific? schools, churches and malls. not saying a gangbanger shooting 3 rivals is good. but I dont think anyone classifies this as as bad as some school shooter. which are far far far more and disperportionately crazy white, specifically consevraitves

which you dodged because it doesnt fit your narrative. nice try though :)

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On the other hand, you are sweeping black mass shootings under the carpet as I initially stated.

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no what happened was I WAS CLEAR what I was addressing. you didnt want to a dress that because it doesnt fit your narrative. so you changed it. man up and stop blaming me for what you are doing clown

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If you must focus specifically on schools, churches, and malls, then the data will likely be different on some level, although I wouldn't be surprised if there is a disproportion there as well. The problem is the data isn't as easily accessible since we are now narrowing down to race *and* locality.

Wikipedia has a list of mass shootings in the U.S. during 2021, but I don't have time to go through 693 linked events and determine the race of the shooter or the location, so I was forced to eliminate locality (nor did I realize that you were so specifically hung up on schools, churches, and malls rather than referencing them as a generalization). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2021

Why don't you tell me what the statistics are for schools, churches, and malls?

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yes thats what my comment was. is reading hard?

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Blacks do not commit more mass shootings. Whites do. Blacks commit more gun-related crimes overall, but the mass shooters are almost exclusively white.

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bump

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i never cared for Dano, and this movie did not help my opinion

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What did you think of him in There Will Be Blood? Dano hasn't been great in everything but that was an amazing performance to me.

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i thought he was OK but also agree with Tarantino saying [Dano] was absolutely mismatched alongside Daniel Day-Lewis

maybe he was at his best in The Girl Next Door.. smaller part, his goofy look was perfect

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Nobody can be as good as Daniel Day-Lewis, everyone pales in comparison to him.

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Not sure what this does have to with anything, but no, I don't fap while watching The Dark Knight. I like it, but it's not THAT good, and it's hardly fap material.

If that's what you did while watching this at the cinemas, good for you. Just keep it to yourself, all right?

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I actually thought he and Jeffery wright were the best parts, it was Zoe Kravitz I didn’t like

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Total miscast, along with Pattinson. DC sucks when it comes to getting the right person in the role.

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I liked him. Because of his resemblance to real-life psychos, I found him quite creepy and totally believable. Those "cliches" are patterns for a reason.

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Please, list me five real-life psychos that fit all of those patterns.

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Not every psycho has to check every box.

But the crazy manifestos and motives against society we see in guys like the Unibomber. We see the meek-nerd appearance in people like the Columbine shooters and the guy who shot John Lennon. His mood swings (laughter, rage, sorrow, etc.) are easily observed in mentally-deranged persons (which, he is).

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I just don't see it, sorry. The Columbine shooters' physical appearance hardly resembles that of the Riddler in this film. They were both reasonably good-looking kids that dressed and looked confident on the outset. Neither of them wore glasses either. John Hinckley Jr. did look somewhat geeky with glasses, but the guy overall is more plain-looking than straight up geeky-looking.

The notion of the geeky-looking, glasses wearing, childlike serial killer psychopath is really more an invention of pop culture and urban myth than anything. Yes, there are SOME that fit that bill exactly, but considering how psychopaths are known to generally score pretty high on IQ tests, the idea that they have these constant childlike outbursts and emotional firestorms hardly match up. If anything, psychopaths are known to generally act unusually calm under pressure, even in circumstances that would leave the rest of us shaking or begging for mercy. Schizophrenics are known to have frantic outbursts, not psychopaths.

Ever see Michael Mann's Manhunter? That film's portrayal of both Hannibal Lecter and Francis Dollarhyde rings far truer than Paul Dano's performance in this film. Check it out if you haven't.

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The notion of the geeky-looking, glasses wearing, childlike serial killer psychopath...Yes, there are SOME that fit that bill exactly


So there's no issue here then. It's a realistic portrayal.

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It's a stereotype, the kind that lazy, unimaginative Hollywood screenwriters would resort to. Saying that he's a realistic portrayal of serial killers in general, would be like saying Lady Tremaine from Cinderella is a realistic portrayal of stepmothers as a whole.

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Literally anyone can have strong emotional outbursts if they're unhinged enough. And plenty do (both psychopaths and sociopaths alike) in real life. Having a high IQ doesn't stop you from being emotional either

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