Maybe it didn’t work for you, most other viewers disagree. Same with Memento.
John Woo’s action scenes are amazing. The minute people in his movies stop trying to kill each other he basically becomes Kevin Smith.
Gyllenhall was more than a damsel in distress, Bale isn’t awful, and the dialog isn’t flat. That’s all just you being whiney. Get over it, he’s a good director that you’ve decided to hate to cop a position. Hell I might even go see his Superman movie and I don’t even like Superman. He IS filling the general idea with content, you just apparently don’t like the content, which again is a problem with the VIEWER not the movie. Insomnia isn’t written by him and is his weakest movie, still pretty good, of course you’ll hate it because that’s the position you’ve decided to take.
‘Face Off’ has funny dialogue. It’s one of the best ‘blockbuster’ type films of the 1990s. I got my position by seeing Nolan’s films. Gyllenhall being tied to a chair while Batman decides whether to save his girl or the greater good is a hoary cliche. You could find that scenario in old comic books and Nolan doesn’t treat it ironically. Bale’s gruff Batman voice was just embarrassing. Tim Burton’s ‘Batman Returns’ has a lot more verve and personality than Nolan’s work. I frankly can’t recall much about ‘The Dark Knight’ at all except Heath Ledger’s showboating. For that matter, I liked Kevin Smith’s ‘Dogma’ more than any of Nolan’s films.