BATMAN: UNDER THE RED HOOD (2010)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

In my review of the original comic-book continuity of UNDER THE RED HOOD-- the storyline that returned Second Robin Jason Todd to the ranks of the living-- I observed that writer Judd Winick produced a rambling script with a lot of extraneous characters. But I credit Winick with producing a much more stripped-down version of his own story for the 2010 animated adaptation.

The script keeps the original famous/infamous scenario in which Jason is beaten to death by the Joker's crowbar. Gone, perhaps inevitably, is the idea that Jason was revived by some obscure cosmic phenomenon called "Hypertime," only to be discovered afterward by Batman's foes Ra's Al Ghul and his daughter Talia. This time, Winick devises a new situation in which Ra's has some scheme he doesn't want Batman messing with, so the mastermind hires Joker to run interference. After Second Robin's brutal slaughter, Ra's secretly steals the body of Jason and uses one of the Lazarus Pits to revive the dead adolescent. Jason does come back to life, but goes mad and runs off, eluding even the great resources of The Demon. 

When Jason comes back, he dons a variant of an identity once sported by the Joker before his clown-ification, as part of a long-con strategy to lure the Clown Prince of Crime into his grasp. But Red Hood's greater strategy is to become a player on the Gotham crime scene as a way of rejecting everything Batman taught him in his role as Robin. He doesn't care about being a crime-lord; he just wants to kill criminals while flouting Batman's ethos. Winick also comes up with a novel way to dovetail Red Hood's war on Gotham's major crime-lord Black Mask with his plans to gain revenge on Joker. 

Despite assorted changes to the overall plot, Winick does a fine job of translating the psychological conflict between Red Hood and his mentor in the big climax, ending in Red Hood's escape-- but as yet, no more major animated incarnations. The DTV film's best moment is not from the segment with Jason as Red Hood though, but in an original-to-the-video scene in which we see Batman and Second Robin fighting the Riddler. It catches much of the appeal of the Golden Age Batman and Robin shenanigans, but with a slight undercurrent of dark irony.