Batman: The Killing Joke

Shares the few weaknesses of the short comic it is based on, but adds a bunch of its own new weaknesses to try and get it up to a theatrical runtime and justify its cinema release. I think part of the reason the reception for _The Killing Joke_ has been so overwhelmingly negative is that the expectations were so high going in. But that wasn't without cause. It sees the long awaited return of both Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill to their famed DC roles, and the comic it's based on is widely regarded as one of the better stories ever published by the company. And of these lofty expectations, _The Killing Joke_ falls short. Hamill is great, and Kevin Conroy usually is as well. There are a couple of occasions that the latter slipped though. I don't know if he's rusty or just didn't care, but his voice performance is not 100%. The story essentially meets that of its source material, but rather than expand the existing story, they chose to awkwardly force an entirely different one in beforehand, to the point that this is essentially two episodes of two different shows, rather than a single cohesive movie. _The Killing Joke_ is a little gross and is not the return to form for DC Animation that we all had hoped it would be, but the final sequence is fantastic and I don't know that the movie overall deserves quite as much vitriol as it has had. _Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole._