WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for The Batman, now in theaters.
In The Batman, Paul Dano turned in yet another riveting performance, shocking DC fans to the core with his sympathetic depiction of Riddler. The enigmatic villain embarked on a crusade to cleanse Gotham of corruption, from politicians to cops to elites like the Wayne family.
Admittedly, it was a terrorist vendetta, but given his poor upbringing, how he saw the lower-class suffocated, and how the rot continued to fester, it was understandable why he became, in his mind, a misunderstood freedom fighter who wanted a better city for orphans like himself. However, this role wasn’t Dano’s most tragic villain — that actually occurred in Prisoners.
In Denis Villeneuve’s 2013 movie, Dano’s Alex Jones was fingered for the kidnapping of young girls in Pennsylvania. He drove around town, cutting a prowling, creepy figure, which is why the cops brought him in.
Most evidence pointed towards him, but they couldn’t seal an arrest beyond reasonable doubt, which is why one of the fathers, Hugh Jackman’s Keller, kidnapped and tortured him for days on end. It even made another father of a victim sick, because despite his daughter going missing, he felt this act made them monsters.
Still, Keller plowed on, hurting Alex to get him to reveal the whereabouts of his daughter, not caring that Alex suffered from a mental disability. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki would eventually clear Alex’s name after other suspects came to light. It turns out Alex was a pawn all along, and his adoptive mother was the mastermind behind the scheme. She and her now-deceased husband lost their son decades ago to cancer, and decided that after all their prayers went unanswered, they needed to hurt God by hurting these kids. They kidnapped Alex and another boy to groom them to be their instruments in a war on Heaven. It caused the other boy to kill himself, but Alex, due to his impediment, didn’t fully grasp what he was doing.
It left Loki heartbroken because sometimes Alex thought it was a game, while at other times he felt it was a puzzle. To make it worse, Alex did have sympathy for the victims; he just couldn’t translate it because he was afraid of his abusive mom — the only family his mind was conditioned to know.
This made Alex’s religious, purifying crusade way more soul-crushing than Riddler’s social justice campaign. Alex was a mindless child corrupted by wicked people and gaslit to harm kids, while Riddler chose his own destiny of pain and anger. Thus, Alex as a puppet on a string, who never had a choice in his destiny, really turned stomachs a bit more because he was robbed of innocence and programmed to sin from childhood.
To see how Riddler stacks up with Dano’s Alex, watch The Batman, now playing in theaters.
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