The Beginning Again

Rating: Null/10 (27 January 2008)

After experiencing "The Prestige" I put Nolan on my list of directors to watch. His experiments have all been interesting up to this point and I'm hopeful he'll show us something really amazing in the future. It certainly didn't happen here.
It's definitely a workmanlike affair, very busy, very grandiose, like the earlier Batman pictures, but there was something about their machine-fed gloss that was more striking. Burton's first two remain the best because they found a rich balance between evoking superhero mythology in minimalist terms and supporting it with cinematically compelling qualities like character psychology mapping to the architecture of the sets and so on.
Then Schumacher stepped in and killed the series, but this team doesn't do much better in the way they try to recalibrate everything. They went back to the tired Origin Story template like in the first "Superman" movie, a big miscalculation as everything gets watered down by this device. We have the anticipated problems of over length, too much exposition, and just an overall predictability. The last problem's not so bad when the story is recognized for what it is, mere scaffolding, but this one is packed to the gills with so many ordinary elements that it sinks any pretense of a master vision. Burton knew to avoid these kinds of rote plot confusions. Why didn't Nolan?
Also doesn't help that the sound design is a poorly mixed cacophony and the whole visual scheme is shapeless and uninteresting. Acting is never really important to these kinds of projects but as long as I'm ticking things off, it is quite uneven. So happy to see Holmes isn't aboard for the next film.
This property has always been plugged into the mainstream and so it figures that this entry continues the tradition of capitalizing on current film trends. A decade ago it was all about outdoing James Bond with ridiculous gadgetry. Here it is louder fisticuffs and the post-"Matrix" Zen master junk of martial arts movies.
Blake's rating: 2 (out of 4)