Product: Batman Begins (Two-Disc Deluxe Edition) (2005)
Rating: 3.0
Not so great...
This movie isn't as great as I'd heard it was, but it was pretty good. Bruce Wayne's backstory following his parents' murder is all more interesting and emotionally moving than what takes place after he actually becomes Batman. After that, it lapses into formulaic action movie chiches with yet another "big machine which must be stopped or we're all doomed".Bale spits and hisses his lines as Batman a bit too intensely, and his scowling lip contortions remind me of Sly in Judge Dredd. He's not that great a Batman, in my opinion. Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon, though, is picture perfect. Gordon has up till now pretty much been potrayed as a doofus on film, and Oldman looks and acts the way Gordon should. Michael Caine is perfect as Alfred, but that's no surprise. The villians were a tad weak, I thought. Not that I wanna see more of the over, over the top camp of the bad guys from the previous 4 movies, but Al Ghul and the Scarecrow aren't particularly interesting to me as potrayed here.Oh, well, I know alot of people aren't going to agree with this review, as this movie was being hailed as Batman's return to greatness long before it even came out. That's fine. It just didn't knock me on my can, and that's just how it is. Still, it's a marked improvement (to say the least) over the direction the Burton/Schumacher Bat-films eventually took, and I guess it will be forever revered for that reason alone.But to me, it's just another Batman movie, with nothing too stupid, and nothing particularly mind-blowing. With 7 big screen feature films under his utility belt (including Adam West, and Mask of the Phantasm), I feel the cinematic potential of Batman has yet to be fully exploited.Maybe next time.