Batman: Caped Crusader review – this noirish reboot feels utterly refreshing

For a guy who recently turned 85 (the character debuted in the pulpy pages of Detective Comics in March 1939), billionaire vigilante Bruce Wayne shows little sign of slowing down. The most recent film adaptation – 2022’s angsty The Batman starring Robert Pattinson – has a streaming spin-off centred on roly-poly gangster The Penguin launching next month and a big-screen sequel due in 2026.

Prime Video’s 10-part animated series Batman: Caped Crusader does not slot into this expanding screen universe (although The Batman director and co-writer, Matt Reeves, does get an executive producer credit). Instead it rewinds Gotham City to an era when Batman was just beginning his ascent to pop culture dominance, unfolding in a 1940s-inspired, noir-inflected world of tough guys, trenchcoats and Tommy guns.

This throwback vibe cannot help but evoke Batman: The Animated Series , the beloved 1990s cartoon set in a gorgeously crepuscular Gotham that introduced durable antagonist Harley Quinn (soon to return in live-action played by Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux ). Bruce Timm, one of the co-creators of Batman: The Animated Series, is back on board for this new project, and the chunky retro design and clean art style make it seem like a spiritual sequel.

This incarnation of Batman – voiced by Hamish Linklater from Netflix horror hit Midnight Mass – still has the familiar cowl, cape and cool car but no hi-tech armour-plated suit or advanced Bat-computer. All he really has are his wits and fists, a Bat-to-basics approach that feels rather refreshing. (The old-school feel extends to the dialogue, which sprinkles in archaic slang such as “ 23 skidoo ” and “shut your piehole!”.)

Batman: Caped Crusader also zeroes in on a formative part of Batman’s crime-fighting career, where he has yet to reach a tacit arrangement with local law enforcement. So his nocturnal campaign of duffing up racketeers puts him at odds with the Gotham City PD, notably good cop Jim Gordon (voiced by Eric Morgan Stuart) and swaggering DA Harvey Dent (Diedrich Bader, happily laying on the smarm).

The fact that Batman and the police are on a collision course gives this first season its arc, but each episode essentially focuses on a different Batman baddie. There are deep cuts such as Gentleman Ghost – a seemingly supernatural highwayman who would fit right in a Scooby-Doo cartoon – alongside more familiar foes such as Catwoman, here lightly reimagined as a down-on-her-luck society gal who is inspired by the Caped Crusader to become a larger-than-life costumed burglar.

Harley Quinn, originally introduced three decades ago as the Joker’s lovestruck squeeze, gets a standalone origin story that gives this version of the wildly popular anti-hero more agency. Underworld fixer and umbrella fan the Penguin undergoes even more of an overhaul: an unexpected spin on a longstanding villain that is worth trying to experience unspoiled.

There are sporadic scenes of goofy high adventure that Adam West might relish. While investigating a series of murders at a movie studio, Batman ends up in a swashbuckling sword duel as a bystander is menaced by a swinging pendulum blade. There are also sly flashes of wit, such as a spinning newspaper front page detailing Catwoman’s crime spree with the discreet subheading: “Guard says thief ‘smelled nice’.”

But the overarching tone skews dark in a way that the best noirs do, with an inexorable sense that bad things are fated to happen. Our cultural familiarity with the building blocks of the Batman mythos only adds to that feeling. Anyone who has seen Batman Forever or The Dark Knight must suspect that the glib, cocky Dent we meet early on will at some point get horribly refashioned into bifurcated bad guy Two-Face. Dent being played by Bader, who did a terrific job voicing a very jaunty Batman in the 2008 animated series The Brave and the Bold , adds another meta layer of doubling.

Linklater has clearly thought about how to put his own spin on the Batman voice. There is no throat-shredding Christian Bale rasp here. In costume, Batman sounds authoritative and inflectionless in a way intended to project total control. But Linklater hints at deep wells of rage bubbling under the surface: one surprisingly upsetting element of the series is witnessing Bruce being mean to loyal butler Alfred (a dignified Jason Watkins). This Batman is clearly not yet the finished article, and sometimes the storytelling is a little rough around the edges, too. But with a second season already commissioned, there is certainly scope for Bruce Wayne to work on himself.

Batman: Caped Crusader season one is on Prime Video .