Flatman

Rating: 5/10 (26 June 2005)

Oy vey...
This is certainly better than the last two or three but it ain't great. It starts out strong but gets longer, more disorganized, louder, dumber and more conventional as it goes. By the time the Hummer batmobile shows up it's found a standard track to finish up on. The Dumb-V has nothing to do with the thoughtful territory Nolan's movies cover. It a true-meathead mobile.
Bruce Wayne wants to fix Gotham and fight crime, so he sulks around the world joins a group of Ras al Ghoul nihilist-terrorists? That's at least as flimsy and poorly explained as anything in the Schumacher dreck. He wants to avenge his parents death? Well his parents were shot by a two-bit thug. Not by the mob, or some convoluted conspiracy. You don't need to travel to Asia to learn martial arts to put a thug behind bars. The burglar who shoots hi parents is presented a figure of pathos. You never really believe B.W. hates criminals. So it has a hollow center.
It's also bizarrely Manichean. None of these horrible conspiracy plots and arch-villains existed before Bruce starts dressing up.
Katie Holmes who's brain has been rented to Scientology still looks like she's about 16, and the scarecrow also. You begin to feel that no one over twenty-two can land a decent job in Gotham. The scarecrow guy is at least as scary with his mask off, with his weird plasticene face and lips. When you look at him you just start to think they couldn't talk Ryan Phillipe into the part.
Chicago has never looked more brooding.