Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (2003)

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman (2003)

Dir. Curt Geda

Batman (Kevin Conroy) rarely gets a break. In addition to risking his life fighting against ego-centric criminals, he risks his public reputation dodging gold-digging ladies at high class charity balls as Bruce Wayne. It's tough being a billionaire.

When a female figure in a stylised bat suit hits the streets of Gotham, being reckless and endangering human life, the caped crusader has to use his night time detective skills and his daytime playboy skills to figure out who's hiding under the mask.

The story offers up more than one possible candidate, which should keep interested viewers guessing for a while. It might be a short while, though, because the 'mystery' aspect isn't as adroitly developed as it could've been.

Batman: Bad Blood (2016)

Batman: Bad Blood (2016)

Dir. Jay Oliva

Bad Blood features the 'extended bat-family', which changes the tone considerably from how it is when Batman works alone against the horrors of the night. Personally, I prefer the latter model, but it's nice to see the filmmakers try other things.

The 'family' in question are Nightwing (Sean Maher), Robin - the Damian version (Stuart Allan), and Batwoman (Yvonne Strahovski). Though separate ordinarily, the different personalities must work together to discover the whereabouts of Batman (Jason O'Mara), who's gone missing.

The lack of any proper 'team dynamic' was perhaps intentional, to illustrate how the individual personas felt about each other, but the layers of stupid that exist outside of that were no doubt conceived to work in a more direct way. Alas, "high tech" villains with rocket wings, a bat-styled antagonist with a secret origin, ropey CGI vehicles, and a soldier with expert control of experimental tech that he's never used before all register high on the dumb-as-shit meter.