Finally got around to this, and was not particularly impressed. Yes, I understand that they're trying to distance themselves from the overly campy Schumacher movies, but this one swings too far in the other direction for my tastes. It's far too gloomy and murky-looking; even the Batmobile is drained of style and sex appeal.
The fight scenes are especially awful, shot so poorly that we can't tell what's happening; we just get frantic cutting from an arm to a leg to a face, with no apparent continuity between any of the images.
Christian Bale comes off better as Bruce Wayne than he does as Batman; once he puts the cape on, he puts on an artificially husky voice, a 12-year-old boy's idea of what "macho" is supposed to sound like. Of the other actors, the assorted villains -- Liam Neeson, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy -- are all too bland, and Katie Holmes is a vacuous non-entity.
Thank goodness for Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and (best of all) Tom Wilkinson, who manage to bring a bit of life and flashes of humor to the show. And the score by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard (unusual for two big-name composers to collaborate on a score) is very nice.
There will, of course, be a sequel; the final scene between Batman and Gordon advertises that more bluntly than I can remember any other franchise flick ever doing. And how much you wanna bet that the little boy who Batman keeps saving in Batman Begins is named Dick Grayson?
No comments:
Post a Comment