Every 2016 Comic Book Movie Ranked Worst To Best
8. Batman: The Killing Joke
Hype can be a hell of a killer. The Killing Joke deserved to be a truly great animated movie: it is rightly considered one of the finest stand-alone Batman stories ever published and it was never likely to appear on the big screen because of the issues with some of its more graphic material - but this wasn't the swing for the fence it should have been.
The frustrating thing is that the film is genuinely great when it sticks close to the source material, but it drops the ball in that respect a couple of times. The prologue is absolutely unnecessary and the deviations from the source are distracting and inferior, and they draw away from the excellent vocal performances (of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill in particular OBVIOUISLY).
The story is short, so you can see why they'd pad, but this should perhaps have been revised as an anthology film - a chapter in a trilogy of seminal stories that could allow the source to shine as it deserved. Sadly, that is not meant to be.