Yeah, but he usually reserves those punches and kicks for situations in which a cop would just shoot the guy. It’s hard to imagine a Spider-Man movie where he shows up in a police interrogation room and beats a suspect bloody like Batman does in The Dark Knight.
The closest he did to that on film was the scene from Spider-Man: Homecoming where he tries to intimidate the guy who was trying to buy weapons from the Vulture’s crew and the guy basically says “look kid, I’ll tell you what you need to know because you helped me out back there but this ‘bad cop’ bit isn’t working for you, just ask politely next time.”
Cory’s story Model Minority plays with all this quite satisfyingly i think. If reading about a Superman type character getting mired in the legal system when he interposes himself between a victim and police brutality is your thang.
I’ve been over gritty batman for a VERY long time for some of these reasons. On top of never wanting to see the scene where his parents die as I’m doubly over that.
The only Batman I enjoy is animated moves/series that mix him in with Justice league dealing with weird issues of alien conspiracies or supernatural shit with people like Constantine or Etrigan sort of stuff.
Not sure how “let’s allow Batman to come into the interrogation room and beat the shit out of the suspect” is an example of police remaining within the rules.
Even when “gritty Batman’s” actions aren’t explicitly sanctioned by police, the author’s point still stands that it’s his disregard for rule of law that makes him an effective crimefighter in these adaptations.
I mean, for the most part I enjoy the Batman mythos, but I don’t think it’s over-analyzing to use pop culture as a touchstone for cultural analysis. In fact, while I’m not well versed in the Punisher mythos, I gather just such meta-analysis (lost on the fascists that regard him as a role model) informed his creation.
True, but the “problem” with Batman and other comics characters are the same problem any media has. And our story of “heroes” in general.
Have you seen “The Boys” on Amazon Prime? It shows a more realistic vision of how superheroes would work. They are state sponsored and they are mostly horrible, self serving people.
Now that I am thinking of it - I find it a bit ironic that in the past where our heroes never killed, they would shoot the guns out of bad guys hands, or disarm them with a flourish of their sword. But IRL the cops were the ones beating the shit out of people tied to the chairs, shooting people in the back, and making people disappear. (Sure that happens now, but not nearly as often and we have things like Miranda rights etc.)
Still, in these stories, for the most part, the players are all clear in their roles. We don’t have any confusion that the Joker and his gang have any redeemable qualities, which excuses anything that is done to them. They are bad people.
I am not familiar with modern comics, but I would assume there have been stories where people who were innocent or only minor offenders get tangled up with a super hero, and we later feel that their treatment wasn’t justified.
I remember a story I wrote in HS where the hero FELIX took out a drug warehouse, only to also kill the undercover DEA agent. I was going to have that weigh on the character.
Watched a few episodes. Too cynical. At least that early in the show the superpowered cretins were caricatures of sociopaths. Granted we don’t actually have people with supernatural abilities, and maybe if we did the corrupting power would erase any humanity (I doubt it). But I prefer characters and stories that are more complex than vacuous amoral rutting pigs. Maybe the show improves down the line. I’m unwilling to invest the time to find out. What I saw of it felt like shock TV aimed at the lowest common denominator. It’s a shame because I’m a big fan of Karl Urban. YMMV.
Even the forensics shows have gravitated to that. That’s what lost me. When they started, they were focused on the science and puzzle-solving. Now, they have freakin’ analytical chemists carrying Sig Sauers.
I am fully on-board with what an extremely problematic character the bats is but what i like about that scene is that for all the violence he doles on joker it achieves precisely nothing.
All the cliches of the '80s action-cop movie amounted to the cops being just insane criminals, all of them (even the guys who are “sticklers” for the rules loosen up and become totally lawless thugs eventually). 95% of the time being outright gangsters, with the other 5% being “constrained” in their behavior by some sort of minimal oversight, that they chafed against. They really seem to have informed modern cop shows/movies in a lot of ways, with the new stuff being more subtle but ultimately still normalizing some really bad shit.
Yeah… that got really weird. Like there were multiple competing visions of the show based on different genres that the writers wanted to cram in, that didn’t really fit, but they did it anyways. (And they were all alt-Batman backstories, basically.)
Well, he started out in the comics as somewhat of a Batman clone, and I’ve heard that he was put in the show because they wanted Batman but didn’t have the rights. Fairly certain they didn’t plan on any hard travelin’ heroing.
Green Arrow might be discount Batman, but my favorite description of the character is the Jiminy Cricket of the DC Universe, which though some might mean derogatorily, I see as a plus. Like @anon73430903 said, pretty lib-soc at the outset.
Arrow was a fun show in the first two or three seasons and had a lot of potential, but I agree with @Shuck that it lost its own plot and devolved into its own lack of self-awareness.
That’s what lost me. When they started, they were focused on the science and puzzle-solving. Now, they have freakin’ analytical chemists carrying Sig Sauers. 
