Competent... and utterly boring.

Rating: 4/10 (7 May 2007)

This film has everything: the right director, the right cast, the right script. Everything but that spark of excitement, of comic-book madness that would actually make it all work. I've watched it through once, and tried repeatedly to watch it again. But each time, about five minutes is all I can stand before suddenly remembering why I disliked it.
Tim Burton's Batman was goofy, ridiculous, revisionist. But Burton is a great director, and he made a great Batman movie. (Actually, 1.5 great movies.) Nolan is also a good director, but maybe he was being over-cautious here. This film takes no chances, pushes all the hot buttons, and fails miserably. Two hours of this and I begin to wonder why I've been a Batman fan for 40-odd years. Give me Adam West!
Here are some of the things that I dislike about this film:
* Spends endless time setting up the character, then uses him as a soulless puppet.
* Burns down Wayne Mansion. (The Start Trek TNG movie syndrome: every movie, they just HAVE to destroy the Enterprise.)
* Creates no chemistry between the hero and the girl...
* ... played by the insufferable Katie Holmes.
* Horrifically inappropriate casting of Michael Caine as Alfred.
* Somehow pretends to be a "darker" Batman, with no actual darkness.
* The Bat-SUV. (Leaps tall buildings... oops, wrong movie.)
* Ludicrous plotting, but without Burton's panache.
* Christian Bale's totally expressionless Bruce Wayne. (And he looks even less like the comic character than Michael Keaton did.)
* Ras al Ghul. (Surely, THE most ludicrous and uninteresting Batman villain.)
* Morgan Freeman.
I could go on, but none of this is the point. Batman Begins is a movie that's much less than the sum of its (theoretically excellent) parts. In fact, it's a movie that's much worse than the sum of its faults.