Batman Begins Reviews
Las Vegas Weekly
There's nothing particularly wrong with Begins, but in a way, that's exactly what's wrong with it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Top CriticWhen you shine too much light, you take away the shadows. And without those, the Dark Knight is just a guy in a rubber suit mugging muggers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
CHUD
The movie slowly moves away from being an engaging film about people and starts to fit itself into the mold of every other dumb action movie you've ever seen.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6.5/10
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Where the movie fails, ultimately and sadly, is in its capitulation to conventional action movie wisdom.
Full Review
| Original Score: 79/100
Slant Magazine
But there's no auteurist signature, no idiosyncratic imprint, on the film that distinctly marks it as a work of Nolan's, and thus it feels vaguely impersonal and remote.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
There is talent and cleverness here, but not much excitement.
Long Island Press
A fragmented tale with a disconnect between sulking mood pieces and hi-tech urban warfare, whose logic always seems to be beside the point.
Nolan takes an admirable stab at developing a character-driven drama, only to give in to generic action-movie conventions with a blinding, deafening, explosion-laden finale that could have capped off any number of interchangeable Jerry Bruckheimer flicks.
Style Weekly (Richmond, VA)
After much unnecessary padding and delay, the film settles down to...a thinly veiled and thoroughly trivialized reworking of 9/11.
Film Threat
Should we comment on the horrendous Batmobile? You probably saw the trailer, so there is no need.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
culturevulture.net
Aims for mythical grandeur, underlined leadenly by a pseudo-Wagnerian orchestral score, only to become mired in pretension to Jungian psychological veracity
SPLICEDWire
The pragmatic reinvention...is countered by several equally pedestrian blunders that hold the film back as if Nolan and Goyer were standing on the back of Batman's cape.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
[Nolan's] effort is not dishonorable, but what it needs, and doesn't have, is a Joker in the deck-some antic human antimatter to give it the giddy lift of perversity that a bunch of impersonal explosions, no matter how well managed, can't supply.
It's still an old-school superhero summer movie, the plotting tortuous, the characters relegated to one-scene-one-emotion simplicity, the digitized action a never ending club mix of chases and mano a manos.
No fan of cult director Christopher Nolan is going to regard this respectable effort as anything but a comedown from 2001's Memento.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's all a little disappointing, particularly given the talents involved.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Maybe, now that this version of the franchise has drained itself of explanatory residue, the next chapter will have more bounce.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Is it too much to ask that the action sequences not be monotonously, narcotizingly dull?
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Apart from the lumbering pacing and embalmed tone, the movie is densely forested with oaken dialogue, wasteful in its casting...and incoherently over-edited in its action sequences.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Without the biff! bang! pow! of pop signifiers, this intelligent, well-made film is too heavy to transport us anywhere but down the dark hole of its good intentions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
