My Honest Take on The Killing Joke

Luke Johansen
Feb 6
5 min read

"All it takes is one day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. One bad day."

Thus goes the philosophical methodology of Batman: The Killing Joke. At its very best, this movie is an excellent adaptation of the infamous comic book, one about studying the nature of insanity, unapologetically committed to exploring what exactly makes the infamous Joker tick. And at its worst, this movie is not even about its source material, dedicating itself instead to a weird and original-to-the-movie romantic subplot that subtracts detrimentally from the overall experience. I find myself in an awkward situation here. The first half of The Killing Joke and the second half of The Killing Joke act like entirely different movies of entirely different quality and make coming to a consensus difficult. But rest assured, I've got a conclusion, and I want to talk about it today. For all of its flaws, this movie and, by extension, the book has got some serious guts - maybe too much. To give you an idea of what I was up against here, in May of 2013, a regular visitor of the public library in Columbus, Nebraska requested that The Killing Joke comic be removed from circulation, officially earning it the label of "challenged book." An artist who designed an alternate cover for the book received death threats online from people who thought the art to be too sadistic. And if that weren't enough, the book's own author, Alan Moore, disowned it. And yet, in an admittedly genius public relations move, DC capitalized on the controversy of the comic book and decided to turn it into a movie. Now, I'm no longer the kind of guy who goes around chasing controversy, and as usual, this review is going to be more of a story critique than a cultural one.

But seriously. How could I not chime in on this alluring a controversial conversation?

Batman: The Killing Joke is a 2018 animated adaptation of Alan Moore's 1988 graphic novel featuring the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime. It covers a lot of bases, featuring the Joker's origin story, an original (and much-maligned) subplot detailing Batman and Batgirl's complicated relationship, and most infamously of all, Joker's attempts to drive Jim Gordon, the Police Commissioner of Gotham City, utterly insane.

I understand that a lot of people complained about the seemingly tacky animation style of The Killing Joke, but personally, I liked the classic, hand-drawn appearance of the movie, even if I knew deep down that it wasn't actually hand-drawn. The animators didn't have to go with this approach but still decided to, and if you ask me, I think it looks classy and evocative of classic Batman. As for the infamous R-rating that this movie got slapped with, a part of me wonders why the movie's so afraid to say the F-word. I'm not the biggest fan of that particular word, but The Killing Joke dances around it like Michael Jackson around his abuse allegations. I wished that the movie would either just say the word or not allude to it at all, and a part of me wondered why the movie didn't fully embrace an R-rating it was obviously shooting for in other areas.

But this is a small complaint compared to the biggest flaw of the movie: for reasons I cannot fathom, The Killing Joke adds a plot tangent that is....just awful. I understand that it's trying to create enough material to justify its existence, but the first half of The Killing Joke is very poor and hopelessly redundant. Heck, Joker doesn't even appear in it. This movie is short, clocking in at a mere 1 hour and 26 minutes, and yet somehow too long as well.

And perhaps this aspect is par for the course as far as smaller animated comic book movies go, but I'm not huge on the movie's relentless softcore sexualization of Barbara Gordon, AKA Batgirl. The animators had a little bit too much fun animating certain parts of her body, and it just didn't sit well with me. But even if this movie is very flawed, but fortunately and even strangely enough, a lot of its flaws are weirdly front-loaded, and once it settles into the groove of directly adapting the book, The Killing Joke really picks up a head of steam.

Joker's storyline is far more captivating than Batman and Batgirl's, and it's such a night-and-day difference in quality that I'm at a loss to explain why the writers put such an emphasis on relative routine for Batman in the movie's first half. Mark Hamill's voice acting as Joker is just sublime. The rest of the cast is good, but Joker is easily the highlight of the movie in just about every way. His presence is excellent, and he always steals the show in any scene he's in. The movie doesn't really hit its highest point until the very end, and in a lot of ways, this felt very much like how it should be. The infamous joke at the end of The Killing Joke really ends the movie on as high a note as can be.

Half of this movie is some of the best Batman we've ever seen, and the other half is legitimately aimless and unfortunately pointless. And so, I find myself in a bit of a critical pickle. I feel less like I'm reviewing a movie, and more like I'm reviewing two different movies entirely. The Killing Joke is too short and yet altogether too long. It doesn't have a clue in the world as to what it's trying to accomplish in its first act, and unfortunately, it doesn't entirely escape feeling exploitative of Barbara Gordon. But conversely, when this movie does get something right, it soars. Hamill's presence as Joker is utterly captivating, the parts of the movie adapted directly from the comic book are by and large incredible, and even though we know the story, The Killing Joke still manages to shock in mostly good ways - and that's a big mostly. For those of you who may be unaware of the sometimes-sadistic nature of the story, please do not let the animated approach of the movie fool you. This movie is not made for kids in any way, featuring frequent disturbing images and perhaps the most infamous sexual assault in the history of cinema. I won't entirely condemn The Killing Joke due to some of its more effective aspects, but I would explicitly warn some away from it.