(I never post warnings like that, but I've never posted those frames from two 1988 Batman stories before.)
Under the Hood is, in fact, the worst Batman story I have ever read. It will probably take me several blog posts to explain exactly why that is. Fortunately I have nothing better to do at the moment, so here's Part 1.
Evidence that Under the Hood is going to be the next Batfilm
1: Having adapted Year One (Batman Begins), The Long Halloween (The Dark Knight), Knightfall and No Man's Land (The Dark Knight Rises), and The Dark Knight Returns (Batman v. Superman), there are 4 "famous" Bat-stories left, as far as I'm concerned: A Death in the Family, A Lonely Place of Dying, Hush, and Under the Hood. (Yes, they've never done a live-action adaptation of The Killing Joke, and they're sure as f*ck not going to.) Note that these stories have something in common, being, respectively, The One Where Jason Todd Dies, The One Where Jason Todd Gets Replaced, The One Where They Fake You Out About Jason Todd Being Back From The Dead, and The One Where Jason Todd Comes Back From The Dead.
2: They teased Jason Todd being dead in both BvS and Suicide Squad. For those of you who missed it: the Robin shrine in BvS, and Harley Quinn's rap sheet in Suicide Squad. If Jason's already dead, that rules out A Death in the Family. I had assumed that the hiring of Geoff Johns - the guy who wrote DC Universe Rebirth - suggested a lighter and softer tone for the series going forward, which suggested in turn that the next Batfilm would be A Lonely Place of Dying - which I am all for, because Dying is, in addition to the first Bat-serial I ever read ("serial" meaning a story that takes more than two issues to tell*), one of my all-time favorites. Might just be the nostalgia. And it would be meta-commentary on the need for humor and warmth in the Batfilms. But...
*As far as I can remember, the first Bat-story I read was something from the 60s where an impostor takes over as Batman and Robin realizes this because his costume is missing the yellow circle.
3: They cast somebody as Deathstroke. Of the four stories I mentioned above, only Hood has him show up in it.
4: DC is really, really f*cking stupid and wants to cash in on Marvel, and one of the best Marvel films was The Winter Soldier. Now, if you don't know, there used to be a saying that the only two superheroes who would stay dead were... Bucky Barnes and Jason Todd. Oh.
Things to consider when bringing someone back from the dead
1: Why?
2: How?
3: Why?
4: How?
Let me break that down, because that might seem confusing and repetitive.
1: Why? What is your Doylist reason for bringing him back? If it's just to surprise people or drum up interest or whatever, then NO STOP DO NOT ATTEMPT.
2: How? How will this character's resurrection play into the story? Or, what kind of story will you build around the character's resurrection?
3: Why? What will the ultimate payoff of the character's resurrection be, in the story?
4: How? How will the character come back from the dead?
I've listed these in this specific order because this is the order those questions are answered in Under the Red Hood. And the answers are, briefly, 1) because Bucky did it/people liked the idea in Hush, 2) a very poor story, 3) nothing, really, the story, such as it is and what there is of it, kind of peters out, and 4) because Superboy punched time real hard.
I am not making any of this up.
Now let's compare Under the Hood with The Winter Soldier, both the comic and (in my opinion, far superior) film versions of the story.
1: Why bring the character back?
If Bucky Barnes and Jason Todd had developed reputations as The Only Superheroes Who Actually Stay Dead, why on Infinite Earths would you bring them back? The cheap answer for the WS film is "because it's the most famous comic plotline of the last 10 years." Okay, what about the comic book? Bucky was the Fallen Friend, the guy who died, a lost link to Cap's past.
Only... he never actually, y'know, died. On the page.
See, what happened was, in 1964, the Marvel editors became concerned that WWII veteran Cap wasn't aging. So they told us, "oh, that Cap-and-Bucky duo you've been following for the last 20 years? Yeah, not the real guys. Real!Cap and Real!Bucky went missing at the end of World War 2. Oh, and they just found Real!Cap on ice, but not Real!Bucky because Stan Lee hates kid sidekicks." I think it was Stan Lee. Can't be bothered to check. So Cap wakes up from his popsicle state and asks where Bucky is and they tell him he died.
From 1964 until 2005, Bucky stayed dead. And then they brought him back, but not as Loveable Kid Sidekick Bucky. They retconned him so that he was, essentially, a black ops commando. And they also had him in and out of cryo while Cap was doing his popsicle nap, so he's now Cap's age. The character fundamentally changed; Cap had still lost his kid sidekick, and Bucky had the trauma of everything he'd done as the Winter Soldier.
Why'd they bring Jason Todd back? Because. (I was going to say "Because The Winter Soldier did it," but actually Winter Soldier only predated Under the Hood by a matter of months.) That's about all the thought that seems to have been put into it.
I would argue that, unlike Bucky, whose body was never found, Jason was the one superhero who absolutely needed to stay dead. (And I'd say that Under the Hood aptly demonstrates why he should never have come back, which is slightly different from staying dead - honest - but I'll get to that.)
To me, it's A Death in the Family, not Watchmen, not The Dark Knight Returns, not even The Killing Joke, that truly killed the Silver Age of Comic Books. Watchmen was a non-canonical one-shot. The Dark Knight Returns was a non-canonical one-shot. The Killing Joke was conceived as a non-canonical one-shot, even if that's not what it wound up being. With A Death in the Family, DC went into a storyline fully intending to leave a major character's fate up to the audience - it was, as Denny O'Neil jokes in the foreword to the Family TPB, the first "kill-your-partner 900-number" stint anybody had ever pulled. But even more than that... here's the thing.
This is the cover of the Family TPB.
This is, for comparison's sake, Barbara getting shot in The Killing Joke (same year).
These are from the pages of Family itself.
If - if - you got it in your heads that bringing Jason back was a good idea - and it is not, which will become evident as we get into the actual "story" - then perhaps you should bring him back in a story that signifies that the Dark Age of Comic Books is well and truly over. You know, tale about a long-lost sidekick coming back to live and reuniting with his mentor as the start of a giant myth arc that promises to reignite the franchise... a, a new birth, you might say. Might even say a rebir- aw f*ck it.
That is not what they did. Instead they gave us a story in which Jason Todd, the poster child for anger management and sidekicks who die, running around with guns and shooting people. The story fails to resolve itself at all for reasons unknown to me. And far from ending the Dark Age of Comic Books, the story instead takes its name from a book in Watchmen of all things - you know, one of the stories that started the DAoCB!
So no, there was no good reason to bring Jason back. Continued in Part 2, which discusses what I guess we have to call the "plot."
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