For the most part, I am in favor of the new Batty-Man movie. (Austinites should certainly see it at the Alamo in order to see the pre-show clips of Filipino Batman. I need to find the theme song immediately.) My complaints are as follows:

1) I can no longer view Katie Holmes as any sort of real person after all the Cruise crap. And even if I could, she's pretty awful.

2) Don't care for the sort of dialogue that makes every character an amateur psychologist. After the third or fourth scene in a row where someone expounded on the nature of fear, I was waving the white flag. "Yes! I get the theme of the movie! Proceed!"

3) The last twenty minutes predictably devolved into the usual summer movie incoherent action melange, with the 'splosions and what have you.

On the plus side, this is easily the first screen incarnation of Batman that ran with the idea that Batman could be really scary. The whole "striking fear in the hearts of evildoers" is finally paid more than lipservice. And speaking of "evildoers," doesn't the Bruce Wayne persona come off as a bit of a pre-political Dubya, the drunken, party-boy scion? Or perhaps I'm reading too much there.

Dug the Scarecrow. If anything, he was underused.

Michael Caine was rather wonderful as Alfred. Making him a Cockney instead of the usual snoot really paid off.

This was my favorite screen Gotham, particularly the Gangs of New York sections.

Since I grew up on the 70s comics, I appreciated that it drew largely on those, particularly with Ra's Al Ghul, who played largely in the Neal Adams era and who I never expected to make the big screen.

Really liked the very end, which I seem to think was partially cribbed from the Year One comics...

SPOILER-ISH

...by which I mean Gordon revealing the Joker's calling card, but also his implication that Batman himself is somewhat responsible for the era of supervillains to come, in that he has raised the stakes for theatricality and large-scale actions. That's something that's always been on the tip of my tongue, and I'm not sure it's ever been fleshed out to that degree. (Although I'm sure there are at least 10,000 Batman comics I've never read.)

Anyway, thumbs up here, although I'm still not sold on this Schwarzennegerian Batmobile.