Batman has been a staple of DC Comics since the late 1930s, being Gotham City’s caped vigilante guardian against a wide variety of supervillains. Batman is also a key member of the Justice League, and he has appeared with them in many animated features. But then there are the live-action Batman movies, with some being much better than others.
For example, director Christopher Nolan created some of the modern era’s best Batman movies with the Dark Knight Trilogy starring actor Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman. In many ways, these movies are a huge success and deserve their popularity, but even these esteemed movies can’t help but make use of many cinematic cliches and worn-out conventions, which means they didn’t age quite as well as one might hope.
9 Police Officers Are Just Punching Bags
In many action and superhero movies, police officers, SWAT teams, and sometimes soldiers are just cannon fodder for the villains to beat up as a chance to show off their power. After all, police officers and the like are familiar to any moviegoer, and they certainly have their limits.
Countless action movies show the police or SWAT teams trying to fight the villain, only to get slaughtered, so the superpowered protagonist has to take over. This idea is getting old, and the Dark Knight Trilogy certainly does it more than once.
8 Batman Begins Has A Lengthy Training Sequence
Some of the cliches shown in the Dark Knight Trilogy don’t necessarily ruin the fun, but they are still cliches all the same, and they might really stick out to some viewers. Another example is the fact that 2005’s Batman Begins has a seriously lengthy training montage with Bruce Wayne and his ninja teacher, Ra’s Al Ghul.
Bruce Wayne trained for years with the League of Shadows to become a proper crimefighter, and it all culminated in Bruce fighting his fellow ninjas to prove himself worthy. This scene had a cool and explosive climax, but it still felt a tad cliche all the same.
7 The League Of Shadows Is The Token Bad Guy Organization
Not only did the League of Shadows provide Bruce’s somewhat cliche training montage, the organization’s entire nature and mission statement feel rather cliche, including its name. The name “League of Shadows” almost sounds like satire, and the cliche doesn’t end there.
In the Dark Knight movies, at least, the League is a generic “bad guys doing cool stuff around the world” group, and they exist mainly so Batman has someone challenging to fight later on, which feels pretty routine by now. Perhaps the League’s lore is better in the DC Comics, but that’s a separate topic.
6 Batman Begins Is Yet Another Origin Story
In all fairness, the concept of a superhero origin story was fresher in the mid-2000s when Batman Begins came out, but in the eyes of modern viewers, it feels pretty cliche, even if Batman’s origin story is exciting and well-made.
Batman Begins is one giant origin story of how the orphan Bruce Wayne became the Caped Crusader, from his childhood to his difficult young adulthood and his decision to undergo a training sequence and design his own cool costume. It’s nothing modern superhero fans haven’t seen before.
5 The Dark Knight Trilogy Shows The Hero’s Parents Getting Killed
It is common for action and adventure heroes to either kill off the protagonist’s heroes or start the story with them already dead, and the Dark Knight Trilogy is no different. Batman fans, and pretty much anyone who has been around for more than a decade, have known about Thomas and Martha Wayne’s fate for decades now, but Batman Begins still portrayed it just to be thorough.
It was indeed tragic to watch Thomas and Martha die at Joe Chill’s hands, but it feels pretty cliche and run-of-the-mill by now. And if that weren’t enough, 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice portrayed this gruesome scene yet again.
4 The Female Love Interest Needs Constant Protection
Fortunately, modern action movies and superhero movies are getting better about portraying powerful, confident women who can protect themselves, such as Captain Marvel and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, but these types of movies still typically have a love interest, often a female one, who needs protecting.
The Dark Knight Trilogy continued this cliche with the character Rachel Dawes, who needed protection from the likes of the Scarecrow and later, the Joker as well. She is a smart and capable assistant district attorney, which is good, but she can’t throw a punch to save her life.
3 There’s An Asian Math Geek
Alas, even the Dark Knight Trilogy ended up portraying ridiculous racial stereotypes — in this case, the stereotype of Asians being obsessed with math. This stereotype is embodied in the character Lau, a scheming businessman from Hong Kong who is friendly to the criminal overlords of Gotham.
This isn’t just implied during Lau’s time in 2008’s The Dark Knight, either — Lau actually proclaims that he is “very good with calculations,” and he clearly takes pride in that fact. This is a minor villain who has aged pretty badly in recent years, to say the least, cliche or not.
2 Commissioner Gordon Has A Fake-Out Death
Commissioner James Gordon has always been Batman’s best ally in the Gotham police force, and he is often the one who lights up the bat signal during times of need. Actor Gary Oldman portrayed this character wonderfully in the Dark Knight Trilogy, but that didn’t keep all the cliches at bay.
Gordon will risk his life to help Batman protect the innocent people of Gotham, but in The Dark Knight, he seemingly died during Loeb’s funeral, and his wife openly wept for him. Then he came right back soon enough to continue the fight, but it felt a bit cliche to have a character do this. Fake deaths like Gordon’s are rarely convincing.
1 The Heroes Are Unusually Tough
It’s practically a running joke that heroes in action movies are far tougher than they would be in real life, and these heroes can get bones broken, get shot, fall from a great height, take a blow to the head and keep fighting as though nothing happened. Realistically, even a trained ninja-like Batman would have been hospitalized far more often.
Batman is a mortal man, unlike the Kryptonian Superman or the Asgardian Thor, and there’s no way he could take a bullet to the chest and then have the strength to tackle Two-Face to his death, then have a conversation with Commissioner Gordon. But for the movie’s sake, Batman can magically endure serious injuries and still function relatively well.
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