ITS BACK! sort of

Rating: 6/10 (27 July 2005)

Coming into this film there was a huge buzz about how this movie had revived the recently dormant "Batman" franchise. I'm here to tell you that it does, well sort of. Depending on how you define a comeback this movie either is or isn't one, it is obviously better then the now infamous "Batman and Robin" and the horrible but not as bad "Batman Forever" but that isn't saying much. It is however not better then the original "Batman" or in my view "Batman Returns". This movie is in fact just slightly above average but has been received so well due to the fact that people want it to succeed and were begging for a "Batman" movie that wasn't horrible and they got it but i'm not impressed. Christopher Nolan who directed the fantastic cult hit "Memento" directs and I'm severely disappointed. After such an outstanding and original film he travels into the world of bland and over-hyped superhero movies. The real problem with this movie to me was that it didn't follow the formula of a comic book movie at all, which some may enjoy but i felt ruined it. The first and VERY boring half of the movie is set in Japan where batman is being trained by the league of shadows, umm what? EXACTLY this is very strange and doesn't fit well at all. The movie gets better as Batman returns to Gotham and finds it in ruins. The Movie does an awesome job of showing you how he gets his gadgets and also explaining them so they're realistic. The bad guy "Scarecrow" is very cool and frightening. The fight scenes have the horrible shaky-cam and you cant tell at all whats going on and you just guess that batman is winning. I just cant call a movie good because its not as bad as previous ones. Overall its just mediocre because half of the movie is good and the other half sucks about as bad as you can suck. Also props to Liam Neeson for cornering the sucky prequel demographic, better luck next time Qui-Gon.