If we don't have BLADE RUNNER (but why not dystopia, even if in the future?), then I don't think we should have any of these superhero films. The character of Batman would have the strongest case as an exception to this rule, as he himself has no superpowers--but most of his adversaries do. (Oh, you say that this one doesn't actually have such an adversary? Clearly nature abhors a vacuum, because once there's a Batman to fight crime, the criminals "up their game.")
I think comic books have been elevated to a status way above their pay grade as a result of this sideways approach to "the seventh art" that has been mined over the past three decades as an ever-more-lucrative pop-culture profit center. The counter-argument would be that this really is a bonafide artistic movement gaining in nuance as its popularity attracts the creative contingent, as manifested in serious (meaning "high and higher budget) films, graphic novels (the gentrification of the comic book), etc. Good grief, they even had a NOIR ALLEY comic book called BATMAN IN NOIR ALLEY, with the Czar of Noir himself as confidant to the Caped Crusader.
Given that, my inclination to keep "superhero noir" (even Batman, who is not actually a superhero) in its own artistic ghetto is now a full-fledged imperative... :-)
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