Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham – Film Review

Explorer Bruce Wayne accidentally unleashes an ancient evil, and returns to Gotham after being away for two decades. There, Batman battles Lovecraftian supernatural forces and encounters allies and enemies such as Green Arrow, Ra’s al Ghul, Mr. Freeze, Killer Croc, Two-Face and James Gordon.

There’s a certain kind of charm to these DC Original Animated Movies that always makes me want to keep coming back for more, even if they’re never quite incredible. They serve as enjoyable animated films that you can watch but you might not want to revisit time and time again.

Sadly, every so often they manage to miss the mark and deliver a product that’s less than super, which is unfortunately the case with Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham. While I appreciate the filmmakers’ efforts at trying to adapt the popular three-issue comic book miniseries of the same name, this is one adaptation that just didn’t work for the most part.

The story here is decent and there was potential to explore some genuinely great stuff, especially with Batman’s character, but this film unfortunately glosses over a lot of this. Also, there’s a bunch of new faces in this story that don’t get explored too greatly, either.

A constant with these DC Original Animated Movies is the animation itself. These movies almost always look absolutely phenomenal and this film is no exception. It’s like a love letter to the past style of animation while also incorporating elements of modern animation at the same time. I wish more animated movies these days looked like this.

The main issue here, really, is the story and how underdeveloped it is. This movie is less than ninety minutes so there is only so much the filmmakers were able to do, but it would have been nice to have gotten a bit more time to spend with these characters to get inside their heads.

What are they thinking during all of this? What else is going on in the universe at the time of this film’s story? There are so many questions I had while watching the film that sadly did not get answered. It’s also relatively devoid of action, too, except for the third act which is, admittedly, amazing. It’s what I wished the entire movie before it was like.

As for the voice acting here – some of it’s good and some of it is just downright bad. The good is that David Giuntoli serves as a solid Batman, although I do much prefer the voice of Jensen Ackles, who has voiced the iconic character for several films at this point.

As for the bad, Brian George stands out in particular as Alfred Pennyworth. It honestly sounded like he was trying to do a really bad Alfred impression, instead of just actually voicing the character. As much as I typically like his work, he definitely misunderstood the assignment here.

But even though I didn’t really like this movie all that much, I am still quite eager to see what comes next for this animated universe because they usually know what they’re doing. Let’s hope we can get a more focused story next time with some better voice actors.

Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham fails to explore its interesting concept in exciting ways and, sadly, boasts a bad voice cast.