My my, they actually pulled it off!

Rating: Null/10 (10 August 2005)

I really enjoyed this one. Although I loved Tim Burton's movie, it always felt a little overdone; Gotham didn't feel like a real city, not a place you could imagine people living, and the characters felt a bit too overwrought to be real people.
This movie feels much more grounded and realistic. Gotham feels like a real city - let's be honest, it feels like New York. And the characters both good and bad feel like real people.
I liked Bruce's development. We never really got an origin story for Batman before in the movies - we knew what happened to make him Batman, but mostly they told us about it and showed flashbacks, we never saw it in any real detail like we do here. Seeing the lasting impact of his parent's death gave you more connection with Bruce, and seeing him develop the Batman concept as a carefully calculated ploy designed to achieve a specific effect made it much more believable than the "I'm depressed, I saw a bat - hey, I'll dress as a bat and fight crime!" of previous movies.
More kudos for the development of the toys. Introducing them as prototype weapons which Bruce appropriated was an inspired touch, and showing him actually developing his gear over his first few times out was another touch that made it more grounded and believable. These scenes also introduced some much needed and well played humour from Morgan Freeman (and Michael Caine is also excellent in this regard.) Things started to go a bit over the top with the grand evil scheme to destroy Gotham. The whole plot to spread fear gas around made no sense whatsoever and is riddled with scientific nonsense : why pour the stuff into the water supply for weeks before? Water doesn't sit in pipes in a city for weeks on end, it gets constantly flushed through - most of their chemical would be flushed away! Indeed, since the poisoning of the water stopped a good day or two before the final stage than little if any of it would be left in the pipes at all. Additionally, the microwave "vapourise all the water" weapon made no sense - it boils all the water in the pipes over hundreds if not thousands of yards, but has no effect on people and machinery standing right next to it! I'd rather they had just focused on having Batman fighting a conventional crime boss, as this would have continued the whole "keeping it real" thing.
But while annoying, it doesn't come close to wrecking the movie. Batman Begins is by far the best of the Batman movies, and one of the better superhero movies ever made.