Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin ran away........

Rating: 6/10 (3 January 2009)

Sigh.
They almost got it right, and with the right franchise too (Batman as the HUNTED hero had the most potential as allegory for the male human condition). Unfortunately at some point the fact that this is a reboot (of a reboot)^3--in just the movie series alone--is a problem. It implies a serious weakness in the CONCEPT ITSELF.
As I was writing this review I asked myself just when did I drop out of this movie? -11 minutes in. By then there were already enough annoyances to have induced my disengagement.
Here are some of them:
1) The reboots(!);
2) the bank job prologue (opening scene) which adapts the basic story of 44Minutes:The_North_Hollywood_Shoot-Out(2003 made-for-TV docudrama);
3) wasting William Fichtner in a nothing mobster role all over in a second;
4) too many red herrings with the ridiculous faux "Batdudes";
5) Batman's audio-"soured" voice;
6) Lt.Gordon(Oldman)'s similarly but accidentally audio-"soured" voice in the vault scene as he says "we'd have to hit all the banks simultaneously, SWAT teams..." (we DID notice,sorry) --and all this within the first 11mins!!
Then there was the manipulative attempt at confusing the ignorant in the audience with the ruse about Commissioner Gordon. Anyone who knows this term will not accept LIEUTENANT Gordon's untimely death, but it's enough to turn us against the screenwriter. This is called "ratcheting" the plot, aka "yanking the audience's chain". And there's a lot more where that came from in this movie--that's its main problem.
One admittedly unavoidable problem was caused be the basic pull--antagonism--in a graphic novel adaptation into live action: superhero comics naturally venture into the fantastic, and it's hard to show the impossible for real. If you're trying to insert fantasy into a police procedural, you cannot get gross or outlandish in the way you represent this.
For instance, during the transportation scene with Harvey Dent(Eckhart), although it already rankles that the truck-driver's offsider does nothing to prevent the hijacking during the VERY OBVIOUS criminal misdirection with the burning firetruck, the over-the-top nature of the graffiti'd word "SLAUGHTER" on the side of the attacking rig just makes you lose patience with their abandonment of their previous police procedural tone.
Ebert likes this installment best. I know why; it's because this sequel tries so hard to be both realistic and allegorical towards society's ills, but it's at junctures like the above hijack scene that if they get it just a little bit on the "wrong" side for people like me, they take us out of their picture.
And I have bad news for the filmmakers: sooner or later we will all be thinking like this. It's a function of their having raised the bar, but just not far enough, so it undermines its own standard.
For people like them, CGI is a trap like catnip. It's all in the tone that you strike; and if you decided that it's OK to depict Two-Face's face all in CGI, revealing teeth underneath the skinless CG-muscle and tendons on that side, then you deserve the flak you're going to cop for it. Here it is: what a SHODDY, mistaken choice that was! It makes your almost-great movie into an embarrassing piece of "shlock"--YES, there is a word for it.
Shlock. Or shtick. Where is Mel Brooks when you really need him?
More examples of wrong tonal balance:
7) the dinner debate scene about Batman's future role in a democracy is theoretically very admirable, but misfires because it's misplaced at the table amidst all the verbal fencing between two couples(!)--its gravitas is lost in the shuffle;
8) Bruce Wayne's awful speech pillorying Harvey Dent undermines our faith in him too, which he tries to undo for Rachel Dawes (Gyllenhaal's annoying replacement for Katie Holmes again smacks of "rebootism"). His venom was unnecessary, what was his point?;
9) (just a little bit) more screen-time should have been paid to the emergent concern of Harvey/Gordon's prisoners in the traffic snarl, so we could emotionally join in on the ferry for the scene's significance for humane compassion. The battle of wills with The Joker about this was significant, but the audience doesn't get to chew over the so-called Prisoner's Dilemma (from game theory);
10) Two-Face was too rabid in his scenes. He/Harvey used to be well-adjusted, so the (ratcheted) petrol burn and the accidental loss of his fiancée simply didn't justify why he became so violent. Without showing his back-story, it's irresponsible to either kill him or turn him so deeply and irrevocably psychotic, all in one picture. Where's the deep significance of "what he lost"?;
11) Dent's hospital-room yelling is implausible: he shouldn't have enough strength to roar at Gordon, let alone have the option of rejecting skin grafts. No ER patient would be given that option. Since this is completely implausible, why ruin our disbelief?;
12-A) Dent's skeletal musculature CG vision is also wrong within the Batman mythos. But burn victims never have clean muscle afterwards anyway, so why depict a falsity when you could have just applied practical prosthetics? -for obvious directorial (self-)indulgence given access to cheap CGI;
12-B) there was no plotwise reason for the deep burn either, since Batman was rescuing Dent from the flames. Why was Two-Face burned? -Again, purely directorial self-indulgence with CG (I would've loved to hear the screaming-match in the Exec Prod's office about this);
13) the darkened interrogation cell for The Joker was also audience-manipulative directorial self-indulgence. The room, if you recall, was darkened excessively during Gordon's interrogation, just so the Batman reveal could shock the audience. Completely implausible; wouldn't have worked in real life because reality can't control "the fourth wall" (the audience's POV). Overripe and ridiculous.
B-TDK(2008) does contain several great points, but I'm not wasting word-count on them. Suffice to say that "Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin (CLEARLY) ran away"...