- Pointless, repitious sadism.
- Senseless story editing (what happened in the party after Batman prevents his girl from fallening to her death? did the Joker just leave?) (did the Joker kill the black gangster who put a contract out on him or did he just pass out or was it edited to get a PG-13 (if so, bad planning)?)
- Bad sound…could barely hear some lines over the video game style music
- Bad philosophizing…same point over and over only various people show that some are good and some are bad, some all the time, some not all the time…which is noteworthy excatly why?
- Tacky uses of 9-11 themes and imagery. Shameless.
- Ending that drags on forever.
- Plot twists you can see from a mile away (bomb in convict, return of Gordon, “clowns” are prisoners, etc.)
- technological gimmicry that is to slapdash and dizzing to make sense
- fight scenes with no clear action or logic
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What the hell does “repitious” mean, and to what sadistic acts do you refer? The Joker’s? In case you missed it, he’s a bad guy.
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I dunno.
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You probably saw it in a shitty theater with a lousy sound setup. I had no trouble hearing any of the dialog. I thought the score was a tad overwrought and repetitive though.
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It’s not noteworthy, it’s the same theme that appears in just about every superhero movie. The character arc for Bruce is him coming to terms with the fact that he’ll have to sacrifice his principals in order to defeat an enemy with none.
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Elaborate.
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No kidding. They could have saved the whole Two-Face arc for the next movie and done it much better.
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Meh.
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Dude, it’s fuckin’ Batman. This is the guy who has a convenient can of shark repellent aerosol in his utility belt.
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WTH does “clear action or logic” mean in the context of a fight scene?
I did find the ending and the silly ferry scenes really dragged the movie down as did Two-Faces attack on the Gordons and that Batman had to take the blame.
Batman and **Commissioner ** Gordon could have blamed the killings on the Joker’s way too numerous henchmen. Why should so many goons go to work for someone that killed all of his partners in the bank heist that opened the movie?
I thought the movie was good and mostly fun, but far from a great movie. The hype around it is somewhat crazed, including people celebrating the hammy acting of Heath Ledger who hammed it up as much as Jack ever did.
Of course by SuperHero movies standards, this was still one of the best ones ever made. The Incredibles is still clearly the best ever and this is a good 2-3 stars below that masterpiece.
Jim
Lame.
Like what?
He was there to find Dent and didn’t find him. And yes, it was fairly obvious he killed the black ganster. Showing him kill him with the knife would have been unnecessary. Seems to contradict your first point.
I have minor complaints about the voice of Batman, but otherwise the sound was fine. Maybe the system at the theater you saw the film in was bad.
Methinks you missed the point. It basically came down to that most people are basically good people and will make the right choices. This is why the Joker’s ferry plot failed, because he thought they’d be selfish.
Like what?
Really? Seemed pretty short to me. Two-Face died, Batman takes the wrap, and then just a couple minutes of wrap-up.
There’s always twists you’re going to expect. There were some that I doubt you expected, like the switch between where Dent and Rachael were being held, for instance.
It’s a science fiction movie. Were you completely unable to suspend belief? Did you have as much trouble with the microwave emitter in the last one as you did with the sonar in this one?
Taste. Personally, I liked most of the fight scenes, as I’m sure plenty of others did.
I think the Joker’s goons were, generally, madmen. The kooky guy with the bug-eyes who Dent was interrogating on the streets was pretty clearly intended to be not quite right. The big guy with the bomb in his belly was most likely a schizophrenic. I think the idea was that the Joker collects the real crazies, the ones whose self-preservation instincts are dulled by insanity, the ones whose motivations are odd and easily manipulated, and sets them to the tasks he needs accomplished. You take a guy who hears voices and tell him you’ll take the voices away and replace them with beautiful lights, and he doesn’t give a shit that you wear white makeup or that you killed your last twenty henchmen.
It’s… the Joker. I am not sure that there is a way to play the Joker well without it being a hammy performance. Really, I’m trying to envision a take on the character that isn’t overdone, but: he’s a stone cold killer with a white face who wears a purple suit. You’re not getting around that. Anthony Hopkins was hammy, too; he was still good. So was Ledger.
Hm. I think the problem is that people are collecting SuperHero movies under one big top, and trying to judge them all by the same standards, as if they are the same genre and thus directly comparable.
I don’t think they are, any more than The Departed should be compared to Lethal Weapon should be compared to Police Academy just because all three feature police officers as primary characters.
I’d argue that the intentions and thrust of Tim Burton’s Batman and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight are so fundamentally different as to make them of a different genre. I can’t engage in debate over which film was better because I don’t think they are fairly compared in that way: both achieve their objectives with equal, masterful facility. Burton made a comic book movie; Nolan made a graphic novel movie. Now, a person’s particular preferences regarding what Batman should be might determine which film they like more, but they’re equally good movies, given that other than the names of the main characters, they have nothing in common.
Comparing those two films with The Incredibles, a character study, or with Mystery Men, a farce, just because they all feature people in costumes is similarly an exercise in futility, I think.
David Edelstein. . .
David Edelstein and David Denby both have reviews for why Bat Man sucks. I don’t fully agree with them. I mostly liked it, but they have a lot of good points.
Those points on why the action was bad are exactly right. When fight scenes are so muddled that they remind you of the remake of Kung Fu where they have to cut away so that stand ins can do a kick, things are not good. There’s no logic at all to how the fights and the tech toys Batman uses are deployed. Things just start happening and you don’t know where or whyfor. It’s a mess.
Regarding people saying that you should suspend disbelief in films like this, well of course! That doesn’t justify completely senseless techbable and dazzle, which only served to further confuse the whole mess in the last fight scene (in the tower under construction).
Repetitious. I’ll fix it in the editing. Sorry, typing fast while at work 
And yes, Joker is bad guy but that doesn’t inherently mean sadism that is pointless. I like my bad guys twisted, but not the same shallow twists over and over and over.
It’s not pointless: the Joker is desperate to prove two points. First, everybody is corruptible; second, your safety is an illusion. I’ve known 16-year-olds who want to prove these two points, and they come across as insecure and pathetic. The Joker hasn’t moved beyond angry-adolescent in this respect; he’s just a lot more competent and driven.
Daniel
drhess is a bit harsh in his OP, yes, but his quiver of arrows do strike their targets. I was as anxious as anyone to see the movie, and while I don’t think all his criticisms are enough to condemn it as a movie that outright “sucks”, I agree with his points.
The film really was not as profound as ‘Begins’, and certainly not as epic. Yes, I know it was a more internalized, darker, cerebral character study, blah blah blah, but it just didn’t leave me as impressed as I was after I saw the previous film. The stakes were not very high (oh, two ferries full of people might get blown up so the Joker can make a point about the chaos of human nature … meh). Batman and Joker had a great dynamic and their dialog with one another sent shivers of excitement down my spine, but Ledger’s performance more than anything contributed to this. Aaron Eckhart is a great actor, but Harvey Dent was one-dimensional and predictable as a character, regardless of which side of his polarized personality that was in play. I think they made up for the lack of a twist or character arc on Two-Face with cool visual effects instead, thinking no one might notice what a predictable character he was. That’s saying a lot considering the character’s whole gimmick is the random flip of a coin. Ra’s al Ghul had a fantastic twist in the first film … where was that on this go-around?
I loved the white lenses on the batsuit, but I’m sorry, the “passive sonar” technology underpinning their use was farfetched. Yeah, let’s link up every cell phone with a sonar frequency to produce a digital grid that visually represents everything with sound waves! Right. What’s wrong with just giving Batman a more feasible type of sonar vision behind the white lenses instead of cooking up that cell phone scheme? Could have served the same purpose and would have been more fitting for the character.
I also felt the whole side story about capturing the money launderer in Hong Kong was both largely irrelevant and unnecessarily long and drawn out; could have been edited down by ten minutes.
And he does way cooler party tricks.
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Oh, they’re panning building made of glass again? Whatever could that suggest…
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Gratuitous use of firghtened children.
- A really boring version of Gotham.
You didn’t like Chicago as Gotham?
I’ve heard this a number of times, but no one has been able to explain exactly what “9-11 themes and imagery” are in the movie, or for that matter, what the fuck a “9-11 theme” is.
I walked out wishing the movie had been about 15 minutes shorter, with another 15 minutes of the “action” switched over to story.
I liked the dark theme. I liked the idea of Batman taking the blame. The pointless random chaotic violence was just not worth the time.
You mean the imagery of Batman standing on a pile of rubble with steel beams jutting up into the air and uniformed men digging through the rubble didn’t look exactly like the photos of Ground Zero in NYC post 9-11? Add to that all the clear analogizing to post-9-11 themes and there you go.
The implication that there may be a Robin in the future chills me to the quick! :eek:
It’s a building that’s just been destroyed by an explosion. What else is it supposed to look like? You might as well argue that the fact that there were firefighters in the movie is a 9/11 reference, because there were firefighters in the WTC, too.
Oh, wait, it appear you are arguing that.
Who, what where? I missed that? What implications?