Batman and Harley Quinn 2017

[5.8/10] One of the best things about Batman: The Animated Series is that it was mature. Despite being suitable for kids and focusing on a guy who dresses up as a bat to go fight crime, it not only took the premise of Batman seriously, but engaged with plenty of the moody and serious, without ever sinking into the grimdark or juvenile versions of the character. For a show that aired on Saturday mornings, it had just as much to offer to adults.

Batman and Harley Quinn is theoretically taking its cues from that seminal series. Both are supposedly part of the same canon Its art style is more reminiscent of the Bruce Timm designs that stretched through Justice League Unlimited than the more anime-influenced look of other WB Animation superhero flicks. It brings back Kevin Conroy as Batman, Loren Lester as Nightwing (reprising the role for the first time in almost twenty years), and DCAU vet Kevin Michael Richardson. There’s plenty of easter eggs for longtime B:TAS fans to boot.

But Batman and Harley Quinn, despite its ample doses of sex and violence, is not mature. It is, as Scott Mendelson once put it, a teenager’s idea of what being mature is. There’s plenty of stuff that Timm and co-writer James Krieg do here that they couldn’t get away with on network television, like blood and bawdy humor that would have made the censors plotz. But it’s all just empty and sophomoric, weakening the material, rather than strengthening, when freed from those restrictions.

Some of that comes down to the barely veiled innuendos and sexual material in the movie. Harley Quinn tying up Nightwing, changing in front of him until he becomes aroused, and then sleeping with him in a quasi-consensual scenario plays like cheap fanfiction meant to titulate teenage boys rather than a genuine release from the studio. The way Harley is framed and animated is gratuitous in its leering gaze and exaggerated movements of her rear in particular.

Look, I’m no prude, but this isn’t sexy; it’s dumb. It feels like superfluous spank material made for sixteen year old boys who are just glad to get their softcore Batman porn from an official source this time.

The same goes for the movie’s humor, which seems aimed at making teenagers giggle while they repeat the naughty words at the back of the schoolbus. There’s a long series of fart jokes. There’s the aforementioned childish innuendos between Harley and Nightwing. There’s Harley calling someone “asshat.” There’s even an “Ow My Balls” onomatopoeia card at one point, which is either a deliberate reference to Idiocracy or an unfortunate confirmation of how low Timm and company stooped here. Suffice it to say, the comedy in this one is aimed squarely at teenagers, or people who’ve never matured past that age, and it borders on embarrassing.

If you strip the dumbed-down humor and sexual material away from the episode, all you get is a bog standard, underachieving “Batman fights crime” story that Batman: The Animated Series did better in twenty-two minutes than Batman and Harley Quinn does with seventy-five. Poison Ivy and The Floronic Man are trying to transform all humans into plants to stop climate change. Batman tries to get to the bottom of what happened to a scientist who’s gone missing, while Nightwing tries to follow leads on Ivy. Of course, that leads to plenty of dust-ups and confrontations and fisticfuffs, few of which really matter.

What’s particularly frustrating is that Batman and Harley Quinn squanders some interesting ideas in its subpar execution. There’s a compelling moment, lost amid the misaimed attempt at raciness, where Harley laments that despite going straight, she gets nothing but rejections from every hospital she applies to when she tries to use her psychology degree, and her only other offers are to be a “hoor” (as Ralph Cifaretto might also put it). There’s a strong notion of Harley not having any real choices despite reforming, while everyone judges her for choosing one of the few remaining limited options available to her.

Of course, that decrying of double standards and limited options is belied by the fact that the film constantly oversexualzies and caricatures Harley, but in different hands, it could be a good emotional throughline. Likewise, it’s nice that what stops Poison Ivy in the end isn’t a battle or a trick, but just Harley making an earnest plea to her best friend. It’s a nice vindication of their friendship, built up in prior stories. Hell, while it’s well-worn territory, even the fact that Ivy and Jason Woodrue are trying to punish/prevent mankind from destroying the planet has some bite to it.

But none of these stories or ideas really go anywhere. Instead, they’re mired in tons of unfunny, adolescent shtick or random plot developments. Sarge Steel and Swamp Thing show up despite not being established at all, and proceed to not affect the plot in any way. The defeat of Floronic Man happens off-screen (maybe?) rather than being built to at all. There’s barely even a plot here, certainly not one with any momentum, just a vague narrative canvas upon which Timm and company squish any number of random sketches and bits and showdowns onto.

Some of them are fun! While totally extraneous, Batman, Nightwing, and Harley running into a bar where various henchmen from The Dark Knight’s rogues gallery is base-level entertaining, and might have worked as a standalone short or something. An old school number, followed by Harley Quinn doing her best Avril Lavigne impression at least has a fun energy to it. But before, during, and after, the film devolves into the laziest, most pandering kind of B.S. aimed at a pubescent audience.

Thankfully, Batman: The Animated Series rarely stooped to that level, more content to explore things like sex and violence in less overt ways and ultimately prove more insightful about them. Batman and Harley Quinn is little more than a juvenile reimagining of the predecessor it’s nominally in continuity with. It reduces the series’ biggest breakout characters to little more than teenager-friendly caricatures, free to curse and screw without network restrictions, but lacking in the genuine wit or maturity to make either worthwhile.