Great cast, silly movie

Rating: 7/10 (6 August 2005)

This movie is packed with stars that made cinematography what it is today, all playing their roles as well as they can. The problem is with the roles...
You have Michael Caine playing a butler. You have Rutger Hauer playing a company manager that gets beat up at his own game. There is Ken Watanabe playing a few scenes. Linus Roache having a short role where he dies. Morgan Freeman plays a bit larger role, but still secondary to the extreme. Gary Oldman, for crying out loud, is an average looking cop that sits happily in Batman's shadow. Now, I like Christian Bale, I really do. He shows promise as an actor and he is under my attention since Equilibrium and American Psycho. I think he is a good Batman character, as well. However, to play an action hero in the company of such great actors must have felt weird. It certainly did for me, as a viewer.
Now, about the movie. It tries to explain in two hours what Batman did since he was a child and until he began his "career". It was a difficult task and it was not really attained. The movie had cool effects, but not so cool as the other Batman movies, no matter how silly. The plot was complex, but linearly so and terribly rushed. To mention here the obvious exaggerations would be an exercise in futility; it's a movie based on a comic book.
Overall it is hard to explain what went wrong here. It was better than the other Batman films, with the exception of the first, but it failed to capture the "feel" of the bat. I felt completely disconnected from the characters and story. Maybe, after all, the loss was in the directing.