It’s lonely being the best, and don’t I know it. Lego Batman knows it, too, and he’s adrift inside his vast hilltop estate. When no one is watching, he eats microwave dinners for one and sits by himself watching “Jerry Maguire” on his big-screen TV. In other words: Everything is awesome.
Yet the moral of “The Lego Batman Movie” is that even a dark knight needs a family, and then some. “It takes a village, not a Batman,” the new police commissioner Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) tells Batman (Will Arnett). Ugh, let’s forget about that vanquished supervillain Hillary Clinton.
The spinoff of the blocks-buster “The Lego Movie” (whose sequel will be sold separately, in 2019) joins “Batman v. Superman” and “Captain America: Civil War” in the new blame-a-superhero subgenre, the one that pleads for bureaucracies and committees over bone-crunching and butt-kicking. Pretty soon there will be a blockbuster called “Procedural Man” who will be using his laser vision to proofread legal injunctions for the ACLU.
Nevertheless, nutty as “The Lego Batman Movie” is in conception, it’s nifty in execution. It picks up at my favorite part of “The Lego Movie” — Will Arnett’s stream-of-consciousness chatter over the closing credits — and runs with it, adding “Austin Powers”-style mockery of the conventions of action movies and a load of arch references to previous Batman movies. (Welcome back, bat-shark repellent.) Opening up the Bat-parameters of the franchise for comic purposes provides some dizzy ideas: Who knew Batman could sing? The movie slams the comedy pedal to the floor, racing through so many visual and verbal gags that it begs to be watched more than once.
Grumbling about how he’d rather work alone, Batman instead accidentally adopts an orphan named Dick Grayson, who calls himself Robin (Michael Cera), and is creeped out when the Joker (Zach Galifianakis) insists that he and Batman need each other. Along the way we learn about why Robin wears those green panties, what Superman’s doorbell sounds like and what Batman wears when he watches movies around the house (he keeps the mask on but changes into a bathrobe).
Eschewing the earlier film’s contempt for middle-class America and its lame meta-ending, “The Lego Batman” movie has a different creative team — its director is Chris McKay, a veteran of TV’s “Robot Chicken” — and a different vibe: more childlike goofiness, less sophomore snark. Here’s hoping that in his next movie, Lego Batman rids us of the greatest scourge ever to face Gotham City: Batfleck.
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