NOT the Batman film I've been waiting for (Just like that, Marvel wins)

Rating: 2/10 (17 June 2005)

Let me begin by say that I am a Bat-freak, and I have read most Frank Miller stories. Having said that, I felt that Goyer's Batman Begins script comes off like a sloppy forgery of Miller's Batman: Year One miniseries (down to lifting the last scene with the Joker's playing card), with villains inappropriately thrown-in. The Bat-Tank is an idea from Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and it is also tossed in, not to assist the story, but to pander to a motor-crazy American culture in a moment of pimp-my-Batmoblie obviously inserted in the script by a Warner Bros. marketing team after reviewing last year's Hummer sales.
I don't mean to totally hate-on a film without cause, after all this IS a step above the Joel Schumacher versions of the Dark Knight, but only slightly. This film has none of the visual resonance or thrilling pleasure of Tim Burton's Batman movies, also Katie Holmes' character is used to twice rip-off the Burton movies. Most offensive was at the end when a familiar line is used, badly, to reveal that Bruce is the Bat to the female lead, which is exactly like the mistletoe line in Batman Returns only much more lame. So lets say I was still expecting better, and I also felt that many of the 'jokes' that were designed to relieve the tension fell flat, like Gordon seeing the Bat-Tank and saying 'I gotta get me one of those.' I did like Garry Oldman's version of Lt. Gordon, but he wasn't used in any interesting such as the personal crisis Gordon faces in Miller's Year One. For me, Nolan's style for capturing the fight sequences was a total misfire, as you could rarely see a single landed impact through the over-editing. ASIDE FROM NOT BEING THE DEFINITIVE BATMAN MOVIE, IT IS JUST NOT A GOOD MOVIE PERIOD. I wasn't expecting perfection, just an enjoyable evening in Gotham City and they didn't even give me that. I had read some reviews asserting that Frank Miller fans and the Sin City crowd will be satisfied with this one, which can't be the case. If Warner Bros. wanted to make the Frank Miller people happy than they would have done a film of the real Batman: Year One with Darren Aronofsky directing, as originally planned 3½ years ago. Also, everyone was saying how serious and realistic this film was, and yet the climax of the film was so overwrought with separate elements that it became laughable. Goyer's attempts to clumsily tie the too-many strands of this film together with a death-train headed straight for the Wayne Enterprises building which will poison and evaporate all the water in Gotham within an instant. Come on, we can do better than this. This is a horrible idea for the ending of any movie, and to me is comparable in many ways to the very silly ending of Batman Forever.
I found Nolan and Goyer did not learn from the mistakes of Schumacher, electing not to emphasise a single villain and instead orchestrating a rather lame pageant of familiar characters without focusing on any of them. In Batman Begins, the genocidal cult-leader Ra's Al Ghul isn't the charismatic megalomaniac as he is in the comics and cartoons and the Scarecrow is limited to an Arkham administrator / mob chemist. I am a dedicated DC comics guy, however if this is any indication of the type of DC films that are on their way into theatres, then Marvel has already won the biggest battle of them all. Both the Spider-Man and X-men films were far superior to Batman Begins, and in particular Spider-Man 2 had compelling action with a story that featured the allegorical properties of the superhero. I am sorry to report that Batman Begins offers us nothing more than action sequences which are obscured by 'stylish' editing in an endlessly hollow feature.