This is astoundingly bad stuff...no amount of top notch writing or directors, no amount of A-list veteran actors could save this. So the question to explore here is: why is the final potion so much less powerful than the sum of its parts?

I'm beginning to believe that movie studios can no longer come up with anything original. Look at the obvious theft: the mentor/student relationship, complete with swordplay, straight from "Highlander". The City's design is a lesser "Bladerunner" or "Metropolis". It's one thing when a writer/director, or an especially talented lead actor can weave in other movie ideas, such that we don't reject the new amalgamation...but here, there's not one deft moment, not one place where we can think 'how compelling!'.

We can even forgive the lack of originality if there's anything else we can secure ourselves to. But the other major problem is that the movie cannot find a tone to settle on. It tries to wrench our emotions through Bruce Wayne's personal suffering...and yet tries to wink at us with clever one-liners. Which direction is it going?

I think the business of filming a comic book with the intent of convincingly fleshing out the pathos, is an impossibility. The comic strip can be relentlessly dark; but a movie has to contain some amount of levity. The first "Fantastic 4" movie found its own tone and more or less stuck with it; the recent "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" found a tone that resonated. This is a slow and dreary hallucination.