We have had great and awful Batman movies dating back to 1989, with Tim Burton’s “Batman.” We have seen lots of actors, of varying quality, in the lead role. Less than three years ago, we even had a Batman spin-off (“Joker”) win the Oscar for best actor.

The terrain is crowded, and if you’re going to make another Batman movie, you’d better have something new to say. Perhaps a fresh approach to the material? Maybe an actor so amazing in the title role that he makes it all seem new again?

In“The Batman,”we get neither.

Robert Pattinson is an interesting screen presence, with an air of strangeness and torment about him that should have served him well as Bruce Wayne. But it’s as if Pattinson has forgotten everything he’s learned since the“Twilight”films. He plays the entire movie in one long note of anguish and misery. He doesn’t smile once.

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导演马特·里夫斯可以让帕蒂nson to go down this path — or worse, encouraged him to play it in this way — is a case of epic directorial malpractice. This movie is three hours long, as long as the tour was supposed to be in “Gilligan’s Island.” That’s a long time to go without a single variation in mood and tone.

But Reeves, who co-wrote the script, seems to have decided something going into this picture: Make it dystopian! Make it a commentary on American discontent! Create a parallel world that reflects our world, etc., etc.

So Reeves ends up with something that feels very 2019, as pre-pandemic as skintight jeans. He comes up with a knockoff of “Joker,” only without the wit and without the great performance, just a flimsy idea that everything is awful, corrupt and rotten. And he assumes that this concept is so deep and profound that he needs three hours to develop it.

The fundamental mistake of “The Batman” is that it postulates a world in which there are no good guys and no bad guys. This is an artistic mistake, in that it misunderstands the dramatic wellspring of all action and superhero movies. But it’s also bad luck, in that “The Batman” is being released at one of those frightening junctures in world history in which good and evil are no longer abstract concepts.

Bruce Wayne, a mopey sort of guy who really should wash his hair more often, has already begun his vigilante career as Batman, but he’s an ambiguous figure as far as law enforcement is concerned. Meanwhile, a new serial killer is going around, leaving riddles next to elaborately dead bodies — and these riddles are directed at Batman.

There’s a case to be made that the freakishness of Batman’s self-presentation (that is, the costume) is actuallycausingthe emergence of equally freakish villains. This is probably the movie’s intention, but it’s a self-defeating one.

Equally self-defeating is the notion that the Riddler is killing only corrupt government officials. As soon as Reeves gets himself into a situation where the villain has his reasons and the victims weren’t so nice, anyway, he takes anything resembling a moral struggle out of the movie.

What does that leave him? Well, if you eliminate from “The Batman” the good-versus-evil struggle, the only grounding point of focus can be on Bruce Wayne/Batman’s internal conflict, his woundedness, his confusion, his desire to do good. But no, as written by Reeves and his collaborators and as played by Pattinson, he’s just a big stiff. His performance doesn’t suggest depths, but an actor’s cramped understanding, hammered over and over for three hours.

All the fun, to the extent there is any, is incidental.ZoëKravitz, bouncing back from a lackluster turn in“Kimi,”makes a magnetic Catwoman — though it was easier to believe that Julie Newmar was attracted to Adam West (on the old Batman TV show) than it is to believe that Kravitz pines for Pattinson. He looks as miserable kissing her as he looked kissing Kristen Stewart in the “Twilight” franchise.

当他终于向他的脸,保罗端午eems genuinely and disturbingly crazy as the Riddler, and John Turturro has a good time playing Gotham’s biggest mob boss. Colin Farrell, as the Penguin, is unrecognizable under the makeup, which is vaguely amusing. And Michael Giacchino’s music is quite good — eerie, repetitive, modernist.

But nothing that works here adds up to anything worth a long slog in a movie theater, watching Pattinson punching guys and knocking guns out of their hands. From start to finish, “The Batman” is mostly just a collection of bad ideas.

K“The Batman”:Superhero action. Starring Robert Pattinson andZoëKravitz. Directed by Matt Reeves. (PG-13. 175 minutes.) In theaters Friday, March 4.