Boring and formulaic at best

Rating: 3/10 (10 November 2005)

Oh my! I am a great fan of action movies. Everyone had told me so many good things about 'Batman begins' that I grabbed the (zone 1) DVD as soon as I could get my hands on it and counted the hours which had still to go before the night. I finally sit in front of my screen, ready to immerse myself into a good movie and...find myself yawning after ten minutes. And things go so bad that it's even difficult to just list the problems. Let me try and give you some ideas:
1. Extremely poor plot. 2. Extremely poor script. 3. Bad directing/lighting/editing for ALL action sequences (and some other sequences too). 4. A musical score which is, well, not really a score. 5. Bad acting by everyone but the five actors with a 'name'.
The overall feeling is that you are watching a completely exploitative movie, conceived from the beginning (no pun intended) as a particularly stupid crowd pleaser. The idea seems to have been: put into the movie all the material which has now become standard after a few decades of action movies, do not do anything even remotely original, be as simplistic and formulaic as you can, spend a lot of money in hiring well-known actors, and you'll do fine. The worst part of it all is: apparently, the filmmakers are right, most people did enjoy the movie! Makes me feel desperate. Honest, this movie is BAD, BAD, BAD without even being funny. It's boring, verging on the insulting.
I will not insult Tim Burton or Joel Schumacher by comparing any of their movies to 'Batman begins'.