The greatest thing about this film is its capacity to bore

Rating: 2/10 (22 December 2008)

How could the critics and the public be so WRONG about a movie? Well, the public is easily influenced, especially if they are teenagers with no broad movie-going experience to allow them to contrast this with other films. But the critics? More and more I get the feeling that the reviews we see are no longer about quality but only about sales.
In this world of "reality" shows that are anything but - and MTV music videos that are to what film-making is that McDonald's is to cuisine - well, who can blame them if they no longer have any reliable criteria?
What is WRONG with this movie? Just about everything... First and foremost, we don't CARE about anyone. Whether they live or die doesn't seem to really matter at all. Did ANYONE get teary-eyed over Maggy Gyllenhaal's death? I certainly didn't. We are not really given any time to FEEL anything. Second: no real suspense about anything. We're not given enough information, there is almost no attempt to build suspense... we just sit there passively watching as events keep happening all around us with NO attention to logic. Just one example: the Riddler is left in a locked room with a policeman. He has bizarrely been left without his handcuffs on... and all of a sudden the two of tehm are outside the jail-cell, and the Riddler has a knife at the man's throat. We don't know where the knife came from, we didn't see him overpower the guard, we don't know how they got out of a locked room. This is LAZY film-making... and it happens over and over again throughout this film. Events happen but there is no logical progression. The action scenes. Terrible. Everything is shot like an MTV video. Close-ups of the action that leave us with very little idea of what is really happening. The car-chase sequences were boring, because we had no real idea of who was where. It was all just a lot of close-up chopped editing. If this is supposed to be thrilling, then I suggest everyone go back and watch the chariot race from Ben Hur. No special effects, no insane wild editing in close-ups that don't allow us to really see what is happening... and yet it is three (four, five?) times more exciting than anything in this film. Bruce Wayne/Batman: stupid voice for batman, is he trying to channel Darth Vador? Wooden acting ... no sense of humour. A bore. The Riddler: better than I expected, but not as brilliant as everyone says. OF COURSE he'll get the Oscar, but mainly because he should have gotten it for Brokeback Mountain, and because he died. Everyone else? Just wasted talent... Such a disappointment, after Batman Begins...