Good try.... but a let-down

Rating: 5/10 (31 July 2005)

After all the good reviews, I have been sadly disappointed. The flutter bats at the start was deliciously scary but after that, it all went downhill from there....
The flashbacks between Bruce Wayne as a kid and his life in the Chinese prison lacked the smooth transition of present and past, Liam Neeson then suddenly popping into the jail to tell Bruce to pick a flower and take it to the top of the hill so he would find the answer in how to overcome his fears was a bit on the silly side. This fed into the next absurd scene where Christian Bale opens the door of the monastery after his trek up awesome glaciers mountains to see what appears to be Ra's Al-Ghul, the Tibetan shadow-ninja cult leader who unfortunately is Japanese and speaks Japanese with some English in between! then there are some more short flash-backs to and from his childhood showing how he turned into a criminal out of guilt from his parents murder.....
Although the training scenes were good, there wasn't enough focus on them, instead the scenes were confused with too much flashback and mixed up dialogue. Christina fulfills his training only to infuriate the leader by sticking to his conscience in refusing to execute a supposed murderer. He ends up blowing up Ra Al-Ghul and half the monastery but rescuing Liam Neesom. Christian then returns to Gotham to save it from the corrupted and evil hands of Falcone.
The idea of using bats as a symbol in which to fight evil was a good idea and fitted well, and the humour between Christian and Michael Caine as the faithful butler wasn't bad. Wayne playing the double lives as the playboy billionaire was also very good and many guys would've found that part great. However, his move back to Wayne Enterprises and for no reason picking the 'Applied Science' department headed by the one-man band of Morgan Freeman was pushing it...it would have been much better if a slightly more eccentric mad-scientist looking actor had played the role instead, Morgan although an outstanding actor was just too serious for the role!... from there the movie shifts along and we are introduced to the Batmobile (which looked really clumsy and slow to me), the Batman suit and the cape etc etc...
The nemesis, Scarecrow played by Cilian Murphy was excellent, with evilness oozing from every pore... but then Liam's League of Shadow ninja who seem to have this weird mission on destroying civilizations of people that have corrupted themselves shows up.... The movie then finishes with Batman saving the city and winning the girl (although the dialogue at the end between Katie Holmes and Christian was really awful and we couldn't really make sense of it, but since they held hands afterward, i presumed she was staying with him?!)... one of the best parts i suppose was Christian kicking Earle out of Wayne Enterprise and installing Morgan Freeman instead...
But sadly overall, I'd have to say that there were many elements of this movie that smacked of a B-grade movie for me... and unfortunately I will probably need to endure another sequel to this Batman prequel given the rave reviews that it has been receiving.