The Dark Knight is so good that it makes this look bad — and its extremely long running time and mediocre CG doesn’t really do it any favours. If this was the best Batman movie we ever got, I’d look at this more favourably. It’s certainly not bad, but outside of the first act, I don’t think it’s great. But it was a promising sign of what was to come.
It feels like Christopher Nolan’s entire blockbuster oeuvre has been in response to the mistakes he made in this movie — which he never repeated again.