Decent but 20 minutes too long

Rating: Null/10 (20 June 2005)

Finally, a Batman that didn't suck.
It explains a bunch of things that troubled me about Batman. First, why the heck does this nutty guy dress up in a bat suit in the first place? The explanation is given, and it works. Good job, fellas.
I liked the training part where Batman gets his skills and his philosophy.
And the back-story about his family being killed is very good. I was into the movie the whole way at this point.
Now for the bad. The action sequences were poorly edited and went on too long. The car chase bored me to tears by the end. It should be cut in half. Then the editing. It's so hyper-fast and shaky that you can't mentally figure what you're watching. It's like they didn't have the right footage, so they just flashed up everything so fast that we don't notice it. It's jarring and doesn't make for a good sequence. Check out the fight scenes at the end to get a feel for what I'm saying.
I was ahead of the story, which is never good. As soon as I saw them pouring the poison into the pipe, I knew where it was going - a full 20 minutes before the characters did. That's not a good thing.
Lastly, the movie was 20 minutes too long. I checked my watch 3 times by the end.
PS - the logic of the villains was absurd. They hate crime and criminals, so they decide to kill a whole city instead of focusing on the criminals themselves? What? Sorry, but the absurdity of it bothers me.
All in all, the best Batman flick to date, which considering how bad all of them were, isn't that impressive.