On the brink of great but....

Rating: 6/10 (15 June 2005)

This film could have been better on so many levels. The dialogue was full of terrible Hollywood blockbuster one liners and comic relief....that pretty much ruined the movie that I had extremely high hopes for. Batman has casual conversations with the other cast members in certain scenes. The fight scenes are so vague and opaque that the audience can't track who's hitting who and what's going on. It's a shame, because the scenes with Bruce Wayne really shined. If you are all about the film being very close to the comic book, you will really enjoy it. If you are below the age of 16, you will probably love it. Hollywood has once again infected one of my director hopefuls. I guess the only hope we can have left is Quentin T. who still seems to be making original pictures with great dialogue. *sighs* Cillian Murphy is pretty good, Michael Caine is one of the owners of the one liners, Gary Oldman is underused and very subtle. Katie Holmes is in the film too much. Liam was very good. Christian Bale, my favorite actor was great as Bruce Wayne, but has only one scene in which he really shines as the Batman, when he is expressively angry. It's probably the only scene with any sort of depth and emotion in the whole film. I believe 2 more pictures are supposed to spring from this, I hope they are better. I'd rather see the first Tim Burton Batman than this one. I think the biggest problem is that most of the emotion of the film is in the first 30-40 minutes. The cinematography is very good, and the lighting used vast amounts of natural light. The audience needed more shots from Batman's subjective point of view.