one of the dumbest movies of all time

Rating: 1/10 (11 August 2008)

I can't believe this movie got so high ratings! Have you all lost your minds?! This is one of the dumbest movies I have ever seen, and I'm not talking Batman's kicks being more than match for bullets! This is a comic-based movie, suspension of disbelief is due with regard to things like that or cops cooperating with Batman (cops don't like sharing *any* power, and neither does the govt apparatus, which would rather have Joker murder a hundred of civilians than let one vigilante like Batman go free).
Where suspension of disbelief is NOT due are the movie's messages that it dumps in truckloads on viewer's heads! Aw the poor corrupted cop who did this because of her mother's hospital bills! Aw hear ye the socialized medicine is needed! Aw! Aw we do spying on people where necessary but it's still wrong! Aw! Aw we never kill villains, even when they wrong-do us! Aw! Aw the prisoners are at heart good people, we just should re-socialize them more! Aw! The scene that topped all the other in hypocrisy and idiocy was when one of the prisoners has thrown the detonator for the 'civilian' boat through the window. In real life he'd be pushing the button in a second. This is where the movie gets it all wrong. Or perhaps it lies to us but in such way that we should notice? After all, at the end of the movie we are lectured that some things are more important than the truth? Like, having a hero with bad taste in women? Speaking of which, you don't really believe that Brucey and Harvey would swoon all over the mediocre-looking Rachel? In real *real* world the two would rather be jointly gang-banging the Russian ballerina (which was a stunner) than trying to get Rachel's affection, who in turn had a misfortune of a scriptwriter getting her spout the mandatory post-feminist line (oh Bruce don't make me any chance blah blah), but let's put this aside and come back to make-believe real world.
Strangely, in this movie the only character with an ounce of sanity was Joker, he just did not let that sanity get in his way. Have you noticed this? He was the only character that the scriptwriters let tell the truth; how things were in his view. Everyone else was a puppet with mind tied up by shallow politically-correct slogans. So even here the movie got it wrong: the Joker *was* sane, just evil.
All in all, this was not the epic battle between good and evil, but between dumb and evil. Perhaps that is why this movie was after all so *boring*. The characters are shadows of their former selves from previous Batman movies. This is a version disinfected from everything that has mental life, like in one South Park episode where the directors digitally replaced all the guns with walkie-talkies in their movies. This movie has had that kind of surgery applied to it at the scriptwriting stage. The result is a neutered cat instead of a tiger. Tragedies portrayed in it are fake, we feel that characters portrayed in it do not feel what they exhibit, but exhibit what they feel they *should have been* exhibiting, because they feel watched all the time.
One of reasons the movie is not believable is precisely because good guys do not pull the trigger. The good guys are PC pussies with lawsuits worrying them more than bullets. The dumb ideology, and yes, politicized world-view, emerges even in selection of the main hero: a lawyer. Lawyer as a hero? Puhlease. Everyone is a walkie-talkie for some false line, you get the idea. This is a movie staffed with mannequins instead of characters.
I had a gnawing suspicion somewhere at the back of the head when I was watching the movie that all of it was result of cold calculation, that it was all just designed to pull emotional strings of naivetés with whatever calls, once to "never kill a villain", then to "tax-funded health-care is Good!" thing, then whatnot. This movie does not believe in itself. Why should I believe in it then? And don't tell me 'it's just a movie'. Yes, it's just a movie. Just an exceptionally dumb one.