Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
As Batman hunts for the escaped Joker, the Clown Prince of Crime attacks the Gordon family to prove a diabolical point mirroring his own fall into madness.
Batman: The Killing Joke adapts one of DC's most celebrated graphic novels with reasonable fidelity, preserving its psychological tension and the Joker's origin flashbacks. The controversial Barbara Gordon prologue added for the film is widely considered a weak expansion that pads runtime without adding meaningful depth, dragging the plot score down from what the source material alone might warrant. The voice acting from Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy is a genuine highlight, delivering career-defining performances in their iconic roles, though the supporting cast is more workmanlike. Animation quality is serviceable but uninspired — it lacks the visual boldness of the source material's Brian Bolland artwork, feeling flat and TV-budget rather than cinematic. Novelty is moderate: the source story is iconic and the psychological descent angle is distinctive, but the adaptation doesn't bring a fresh vision to the material. The ending retains the graphic novel's ambiguous, haunting final laugh, which remains one of comics' most memorable conclusions.