A child's parents are brutally murdered, similar to what happened to Batman. The man behind it is the recently escaped Joker, who, along with Harley Quinn, are treated to one of their most hauntingly creepy depictions ever, and not only of this medium(counting The Dark Knight). Best moment of it? He's sitting by a mirror, we don't see his face, and he is mumbling incoherently to himself. You gotta see it to believe how effective it is(and note that this is currently available on YouTube). The performances in general are great, with only brief exceptions. Bruce Wayne's alter ego has a rock-hard face and a spot-on voice(see, Bale? This is how it's done), and his narrations has him questioning if he's doing the right thing, something too many fan films forget. Unfortunately, those portions do suffer from occasional uninspired writing and bad reads. On the whole, the script is marvelous, if I can't for the life of me make sense of the moral(best I can tell, it's frankly a complete betrayal of the canon of the hero, and I can never stand that, if you want something different, make a new one, don't change something established to fit what you want if it goes directly against it), and the ending is, as someone in this notes, anti-climactic. The production values are quite high, with several large locations(a carnival, and a totally absolutely in no way not at all utterly gratuitous strip club with tons of cleavage, skin and butt shots), dozens of extras, and nearly flawless cinematography, make-up, props(the one obvious thing is the grappling gun, which might as well be neon colored), filming, editing and lighting. Action is sparse(I'd call this a thriller, genre-wise), well-choreographed, swift and really hits the mark(the hand-held camera is arguably excessive). The tone is relentlessly bleak throughout. There is a lot of disturbing content and a little bloody violence in this. I recommend this to comic book readers, as it will satisfy many of them(and it includes a few more well-known characters from there than it needed(I'm not sure Black Canary is even identified in it, though I know who was supposed to be her), without any of them being out of place, forced in or poor adaptations of the source material(suits, personalities and basic appearances)). 7/10
