Maybe not such a good film as others would lead you to believe

Rating: Null/10 (11 August 2008)

I hate to say it, since so many others have found this film excellent, but I found myself rather glad when it ended. I was a big comics fan as a child and still read graphic novels, so that's not the problem.
First, I felt that the characters were rather two dimensional and leant far too heavily on the acting of the excellent cast. Some of them, notably Morgan Freeman, may have well have had their eyeballs painted on their eyelids, so routine was their contribution. A lot of this lack of character came from the plot's being needlessly complicated, ruining any chance of genuine suspense: time and again set pieces felt rushed through to get on to the next thing. The best part – the Joker's two bomb, two ship conundrum – could have been the centrepiece of the last section of the film and could have built up some tension through the development of the characters on the boat, but this scene was used and dumped. Nolan should have really cut back on the spectacle and invested more time on people, as the earlier Christopher Reeve Superman movies tried to do: in this movie, there were simply too many things going on. There's nothing in this film, nothing at all, that hasn't been done over and over again in previous films. This film might do it better, but the incidents are still hackneyed. I wouldn't mind though, if any of the constant crises of the plot had any point. Blowing up a hospital probably was a great effect, but did it advance the plot or the characters? There could have been plenty of tension in the practicalities of having the very ill patients being moved and the Batman having to help when say he should have been somewhere else, maybe saving his girlfriend. Instead in a rather old fashioned manner Batman kept turning up often without any explanation, like the cavalry. (Indeed, Batman zips off at the end cornily like the Lone Ranger.) The lack of character interest in the film was particularly apparent in the film's casual attitude towards violence, with seemingly hundreds of people being shot and killed and forgotten about as in a video game, not to mention scenes of torture in police custody that in the context of the film was put forward, surprisingly given Guantanamo etc, as a good thing. This led to the viewer not really caring about anybody in the cast or what happened to them. I didn't care for the tasteless use of knives on the part of the Joker, but this has a particular resonance for people here in Britain at the moment, and seems to be a lot more troubling area for us than probably for American filmmakers.
While the Tim Burton version of Batman was set in a kind of art deco fantasy, which to my mind worked better, this film was set in a recognisably real city. This led to the various sillinesses of comic book movies being more obvious and irritating. Why for example would you design a car with a hidden motorbike? How can you fall off a tall building onto a car from penthouse to ground level and not kill yourself? (Indeed, how can you glide with a cape in the first place?) How does the Joker recruit anyone to his gang when he deliberately murders them during jobs? And why when his lover dies, a woman he's supposed to have known from childhood, does Bruce Wayne not even bother to go to the funeral? More worryingly, why are men and women's roles in Gotham City seemingly no further ahead than the 1950s? (For instance, when her children are menaced by Two-Face, here was a great opportunity for the minor character Mrs Gordon to have a few surprising and challenging lines - instead she doesn't say anything.)
As in so many movies these days, the effects and technical quality were excellent. My difficulty is just that for me this film was like watching a poor children's animation – well-made but unreal, uninvolving, with no character interest, and if longer than 20 minutes a bit tiresome. Fair enough if you like that kind of thing, but would any of the undoubtedly many fans of this film really want to watch it more than once?