Watched five seasons (100 episodes) of the USA's Gotham (2014). The movie is essentially how James Gordon rose in ranks from being a detective to police commissioner and how young billionaire brat Bruce Wayne developed into Batman. While the main story and subplots unfold, we are also shown the beginnings of the DC comic book villains, among them Catwoman, Penguin, Riddler, Joker, Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze, Firefly, and Scarecrow.
Gotham fails in dishing out too many characters and not providing adequate closure for everyone. There are many loose threads at the end of Episode 100, many characters abandoned, and many subplots discontinued. The seasons are imbalanced: Season 1 has two or three minor villains per episode, most of them being killed off only so that some villains except the iconic ones are killed for the audience's satisfaction and therefore keep them watching the subsequent episodes. Season 2 has a slower pace, devoting two or three episodes to each new, minor villain while fleshing out the major ones. Season 3 is derivative of X-Men, the mutants being antagonists rather than protagonists. Season 4 verges on being a horror movie a la Friday the 13th. Also in Season 4, Episode 13, the dream sequences and hallucinations showcasing the overused "Confrontation of the Jungian Shadow" were awkward and even out of place. In Season 5 there seems to be too much of a rush to kill off villains and give closure to their subplots, as though the writers were aware that they had to do so, and quickly. Season 5 Episode 11 contains the real climax of the movie, Episode 12 serving merely as denouement.
Since there are too many characters in the movie, there is no real, cohesive, ensemble acting. Each performer was essentially on his own, resulting in a Konstantin Stanislavsky festival. Most of the villains were ham actors and caricatures, forgetting that they were in a movie rather than in a comic book. Many characters were overcooked, seared, and charred over the writers' grill. The most convincing performer, to me, was Robin Lord Taylor as Penguin. Despite everything the hair and make-up department did to his appearance, he always came across as convincing and three-dimensional. Added to that, his face was very expressive. I noted that he was given the most number of close-ups and some of the best passages of dialogue. Second to him was Camren Bicondova as young Selina Kyle. Other major protagonists were less impressive. Ben McKenzie as James Gordon came across as a Mel-Gibson-Bruce-Willis-Channing-Tatum derivative, especially with his frequent 3/4-angle shots. David Mazouz as young Bruce Wayne was a softer improvement of Tyler Posey in Teen Wolf. The Barbara-Tabitha-Selina triad was simply a variant of Charlie's Angels. And Sean Pertwee as Alfred was spinsterish, repetitive, and oftentimes irritating. He was not fatherly. He was motherly.
The production design was evidently expensive, but the screenplay left much to be desired. Aside from all those loose ends too many mishaps and survivals happened to Gordon, and his pep talks eventually became redundant and corny. You know you have to leave the screen and make yourself a sandwich whenever a character begins a monologue with "When I was a child..." And jaded lines such as "What are you doing here?", "What happened to you?", and "All right, listen up!" could have been creatively paraphrased. Too many characters were killed and then resurrected, some of them more than once, so that, in the end, death and dying never seemed like real threats to anyone. And everyone wonders why terrorists plant bombs in buildings and on themselves, shoot at people at intersections and in fast-food restaurants, and massacre schoolchildren inside classrooms. Add to that the cynical, subliminal message that we cannot count on the government for salvation, because the government is interested only in saving itself.
Indeed, in the end, we are what we are not because of corruption but because of sheer bad luck.
