Batman Under the Red Hood Review: Robin Begins

DC has been making a focused effort to adapt many of it's characters and storylines into animated epic, like Green Lantern First Flight and Justice League Crisis on Two Earths. Now most of these have been really good and faithful and while others have been okay but not great. Batman Under the Red Hood is DC's newest animated direct to DVD film, adapting a fairly recent and very good story arc of the Batman comics. How does it fair? Well read on but careful, as River Song would say, spoilers.

Batman Under the Red Hood is a re telling of two storylines of the Batman mythos, A Death in the Family, a fairly pivotal bit of the comic book industry growing up and also one of the first times readers had control of the story as there was a phone in and vote system to decide an outcome and Under the Hood, a story from 2005 of an anti hero appearing in Gotham with cryptic connections to the Caped Crusader. Judd Winick, the writer of that story is rewriting the movie's plot here and he does stay true to his source with some changes. Now what everyone should know about this movie is that this is not a children's movie. Many a time really good Batman films that are dark and gothic (like the comics) have been according to thick parents perfect for their children (The Dark Knight, Mask of the Phantasm etc.) and of course they're wrong and the same goes here. At one point Red Hood  blows some ones head off blood and all.

But the plot. Well the movie starts with the Joker mercilessly beating the second Robin Jason Todd with a crowbar then blowing him sky high. Now that's how to hook a viewer. We then skip years later as the mysterious Red Hood is recruiting drug lords from Black Mask and is going to wage war against him. He's not evil though as he sets strict guidelines like no selling to children. He's not quite an anti hero but not a villain either. Batman has to solve the case like always and figure out his identity, and during the movie engage in many a battle with Red Hood.

Batman is voiced here by Bruce Greenwood and he's actually really good at getting Batman's character. He's no Kevin Conroy but he's not a bad second choice for future voice acting. Red Hood is voiced by Jensen Ackles he's sarcastic tone really brings the character to life. Filling out the top cast is Jason Issacs as Ra's Al Ghul (WAY better the Liam Neeson), Neil Patrick Harris as Nightwing and John DiMaggio (Marcus Phoenix) as the Joker, because apparently you can't have an animated Batman film without the Clown Prince of Crime. The movie has all the top DC animated producers of basically everything they've done like Bruce Timm and Bobbi Page.

Visually the movie goes way beyond any other film and it looks stunning, espacially the action scenes. There's a lot of first person chase sequences and they really rise above the rest of the movie but that's not saying much as everything looks fantastic from the character detaials to the city of Gotham. It's not old school 90's Batman but it's very clean line looking with really nice gothic feel. The DVD also contains an awesome Jonah Hex short which is probably cashing in on it's crap movie but this short is actually a 1000x better than then that shit fest of magic cowboys, zombies and conspiracy theories. It captures what makes Mr Hex great, he's not an anti hero but he shoots anyone who's in his way it just happens they're worse then him.

What it boils down to is this is a great release for fans of Batman, Jason Todd, Nightwing and the Joker. You'll definitely want to have this in your home collection.