It also does that trope where it has the revolutionary "villain" fighting to expose the systemic corruption be/act so unhinged and do evil things as to give justification that their critiques are wrong. It's a really well made, entertaining movie, but it's themes are just such weak centrist bs that I couldn't ignore it.
I wrote about it more in-depth here if you're interested: https://letterboxd.com/peytobrock/film/the-batman/
EDIT: this is a write-up by a critic I really like that's even better than what I wrote: https://www.patreon.com/posts/63389248
Political critiques aside, does it in any way need to be three goddamn hours long?
No, it doesn't. The author of the review not by me that I linked mentions how in writing, especially screenwriting where story economy and brevity are important, you're told to "kill your darlings" and it feels like Reeves didn't kill any darlings with this script (which I agree with). Like he left everything in, even though some of it feels repetitive and unnecessary. It's almost like while the scenes are individually good, the larger story cohesion is kinda loose and bloated in places. I think it could have ideally be cut down to closer to 2:30 or even closer to 2 hours long.
lean 90 minutes, think of all the collective lifetime you would un-waste
There were so many moments where I was like, "All right already, let's move this along, please." They crammed so much stuff into this movie, they could've easily trimmed at least an hour off of it.