There’s a scene in “The Dark Knight” that perfectly illustrates Hollywood’s ongoing fascination with grittiness. It’s the one where Batman is speeding toward the Joker in the Batpod and the latter is shouting, “I want you to do it. Hit me!”
Like the spread of the blue stuff in “Breaking Bad,” the gritty reboot has been invading territory that was once campy, cheeky and fun. And it’s not just movies. Remakes of popular video game franchises such as “Tomb Raider” and new intellectual properties such as “The Last of Us” are hailed for their protagonists’ ability to get down and dirty, to exhibit raw human emotion, over-the-top, cartoonish behavior be damned.
But is that really what we need right now?
Unemployment remains stubbornly stagnant. And article after article points out just how pointless your degree is if it isn’t in business administration or engineering. So maybe we don’t need entertainment full of grit and grime. Maybe we need a little more “Despicable Me” and a little less “Man of Steel” these days.
Because let’s be honest: How much more bold a project would a campy Superman film have been? Or — think about this for a second — a quirky buddy cop flick starring Superman and Batman? Audiences expect grit these days. The day Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski announce they’re jointly working on a He-Man movie that explores the characters subtle masculinity through a two-film origin story isn’t far off, at least that’s what it feels like.
I shudder to think of what Michael Bay might do to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in this regard. With reports that he considered making the turtles aliens having surfaced a few months ago, it’s almost instinctual to get a little woozy whenever Bay’s name and the turtles show up in headlines.
Is Bay going to give us the turtles from the original comics? The ones that dismember living creatures rather than robots and spill blood everywhere they go? God, I hope not.
We need more iconic characters resurfacing with a glossy, cartoonish sheen rather than a gravelly tone and cool color palettes that dominate their screen presence. Hollywood needs to go to grit rehab. Soon.