Yuck

Rating: 1/10 (17 June 2005)

ChristopherNolan made a lot of serious mistakes in this film. First, casting Christian Bale who has all the charisma and gravitas of a pumped-up Pauly Shore. But so what? This film is an obvious feeble stab at resurrecting a moribund Batman series that should have gone to a peaceful demise 8 years ago. Katie Holmes? Please. Probably a nice kid, but she'd barely survive a casting call for summer theater in Akron, Ohio. The pretentious, plodding script is lugubrious, morose and utterly incredible--even for a comic book. What is this nonsense about Shangri-La and Ninja gibberish and psychobabble about fear and revenge? Don't even ask about the ludicrously lame scenes of battle and urban catastrophe--pathetic. The editors should be taken out and shot. But wait! No! They had nothing to work with! If you need one simple proof of how rotten this is, just consider the great character actor Gary Oldman embarrassingly mired in this bat dung. I did however love Rutger Hauer as Donald Rumsfeld. Michael Caine should have paid to have his scenes deleted. Morgan Freeman, the default Black eminence in many recent films, phones in his routine performance. Liam Neeson, a superb actor, is again relegated to a murky back-story clichéd role as in Gangs of New York and a couple of later Star Wars pics. One standout in this mess is Cillian Murphy as a preening, smarmy uber-yuppie. Now if HE had played Bruce Wayne and Tim Burton had written and directed and Blanchett or Kidman had been Rachel Dawes and Gary Oldman were Scarecrow, who knows?