The Elephant In The Room

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 2008)

My review contains some spoilers.
Maybe everyone is afraid to say it, but there's an elephant in the room and it's that this movie was NOT as good as expected and certainly not as good as the hype implied. I'm compelled to call a spade a spade.
Most movies (whether good or bad) know enough to have a beginning middle and end. This movie was ALL MIDDLE. It was a series of scenes strung together with no pacing to allude to how the overall time was passing, with no feeling of buildup and no distinction between what should be acts that define where you might be in the story line. I guarantee I'm not the only one out there who kept looking at my watch starting around the 1-hour mark and hoping the pace would be improved.
I want to say good things. Heath Ledger's performance was good. The anti-moral undertones were ballsy for a mass-market movie. The 2-face special effects were handled perfectly. And I was a comic fan as a kid and any comic book movie, especially a batman one, deserves credit by default.
Now the bad. One of the things that made the first movie great was the attempt to ground it totally in reality. Barely any suspension of disbelief was needed for "Batman Begins". But in this - sonar cell phones? Uh, what? In short time turning every cell phone in Gotham into a sonar real-time 3D tracking system for the entire city with real-time 3D visuals all being fed into some location, somewhere...? What? And then the glowing goggles that somehow received the signal... What? Was this an attempt to use a farcical James Bond jump-the-shark plot device to make the writing a lot easier near the end? Where's the back-story for The Joker? He's just some loony? What's his motivation? OK he burns a pile of money. How does he get anything done without money? Do all his hired guns work for free? The ones that it takes to move hundreds of barrels of explosive fuel into all kinds of locations throughout the movie. 2 warehouses, 2 boats, a hospital...
The costume modification mid-way was weak and made batman LOOK weak. The actress change, then killing her anyway. Why not just create a different character for the love interest? The joker was EVERYWHERE at all times, like an omniscient god. Give me a break. Nothing was played out as plausible. Maggie Gyllenhaal is NOT ATTRACTIVE (at least not for the character she's supposed to be playing). Bale's voice while as Batman was too forced and was over-the-top. The story drags and drags. No mansion? A penthouse in a city that looks nothing like Gotham is supposed to look. It was a shiny upscale city that looked more like upscale Manhattan. I could go on, but basically there were another 50 times like that in the movie where, rather than helping me immerse into the story, it made me go "huh?"