The Dark Shoes

Rating: 5/10 (12 January 2015)

Although a far, far cry from the cheeseball shoe days of Tommy Lee Shoes, Jim 'sneakers' Carry and Big Boots Arnie camping it up as the bad guys and their shoes, I still had a problem engaging with this film. Not sure why. Maybe there were too many characters and not enough Batman shoe action (I mean, you've got Morgan Oldman, Gary Gyllenhall, Maggie Oldman, Heath Dale, Michael Ledger and Christian Caine to keep track of and that's only the actors who's name I can remember with absolute clarity just now). Also, the film is about seven hours long and very little of it involves footwear. Also: Eric Roberts – forgot about him and his white spatz.
This time the heavily convoluted non-shoe story involves the triumvirate of policeman Gary Oldman, lawyer Harvey Dent, and The Batman trying to take down the mafia by hitting shoes warehouse through Gotham while trying to protect the legit shoe industry. They confiscate this huge shipment of shoes but there a jackboot amongst the plimsoles in the form of the Cobbler, who's nuts and keeps asking people how they think he got his shoes. It's up to Batman etc to sort this guy out but to be honest there's an old saying that goes "The craziest shoes wins the day" and by all accounts the Cobbler, even though he says he's an agent of Chaos, is the most Organised and pre-planning criminal since the killer in Se7en(shoes).
Batman here is all caught up in some sort of shoe triangle with local lawyer/nike designer Harvey Dent and Maggie Gyllenhall's deck shoes, which leads to all sorts of redundancy when they could have been concentrating on stitching and designer laces. The Cobbler however is playing all sorts of crazy games, replacing shoes with loaves of bread, tying people laces together and looking like Robert Smith of the Cure far too much for his own good.
Maybe I'm too much of a shoe fan and not enough of a loads of characters fan, but I found this a bit of a slog. I am also confused by Bales (or Dale?) dropping his voice several thousand octaves every time he was Batman. I did like the bit where the Cobbler set fire to his share of the mafia shoes and then sailed down the East River in a giant Doc Martin while drinking champagne from a stiletto heel.