Batman Begins
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, PG-13, 140 m, 2005
Directed by Christopher Nolan. Stars Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, et al.

I like to draw superheroes, especially Batman—mostly because there are so many different ways to draw him. Batman’s costume, unlike the one worn by, say, Sub-Mariner, lends itself to limitless interpretations; as long as you have the chest emblem and pointy-eared cowl in place, the sky’s the limit. Just look at how drastically Batsy’s appearance in the DC comic books has changed over the years from Bob Kane’s pulpy antihero to Julius Schwartz’s campy Caped Crusader to Frank Miller’s half-whacked Dark Knight. The Bat-Man (as he was originally known) has undergone myriad changes in the movies, too: If you revisit the 1946 Batman serial, both the 1966 and 1989 versions of Batman, Batman and Robin, Batman: Mask of Phantasm, and Batman Beyond: The Return of the Joker, you’ll see wildly different takes that run the gamut from the goofy to the gothic, from the inspired to the banal. Batman and Robin belonged to the latter category; it stunk up the multiplexes so bad that Warner Bros. retired Batman’s cape until it could figure out how to resurrect the series properly. A guy named Christopher Nolan, who made the groundbreaking Memento and the brilliant noir thriller Insomnia, had an idea how to do the Batman mythos right—kinda. 

Nolan’s audacious (and very welcome) retooling of the Batman franchise, Batman Begins, strips the legend of Gotham City’s Darknight Detective down to its most primal elements. Unlike the previous Batman pictures, Batman Begins digs deep into the tortured psyche of industrialist/philanthropist/playboy Bruce Wayne, who was orphaned at a tender age after some scumbag stickup man wasted his folks. Tim Burton’s Batman and Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever only touched upon our hero’s back-story; Batman Begins is all back-story. 

The last Batman picture, Schumacher’s Batman and Robin, was edging too close to the campiness of ABC’s 1966-1968 television series, which is what Burton fought hard against emulating in his 1989 treatment. (I loved the pop art trimmings of the TV show when I was a kid, but looking at it now makes me feel almost queasy.) Though it made gazillions of dollars, Batman was ultimately a letdown: It focused entirely too much on the Joker (Jack Nicholson doing the same kind of lazy, self-referential shtick he did in The Shining and The Witches of Eastwick), and there was no zip to the action scenes. The whole production felt stilted and hemmed-in; it was as if the moneymen feared that allowing Burton too much creative freedom would scare off a lot of potential ticket buyers. Michael Keaton was barely serviceable in the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman, but it wasn’t really his fault that he failed to make an impression—his character was written as a self-absorbed sourpuss. (And engaging the pretty but useless Kim Basinger to play his love interest after the sexy and quirky Sean Young was forced to bow out only added to the dullness of his scenes.) I always thought that a guy traipsing about in a bat costume would act a bit more eccentric in his off hours, and bringing on a very funny guy like Keaton should’ve helped to realize that part of his persona, but Wayne came off looking like a drip. For Pete’s sake, why even hire a guy like Keaton if you’re not going to take advantage of his comedic gifts? 

Well, forget about Keaton. And forget about Val Kilmer, George Clooney and, God help us, the icky Adam West. Christian Bale gives the most compelling performance as Bruce Wayne/Batman to date. Of course, he’s given a lot more to work with than his predecessors. When we first meet up with him, he’s doing time somewhere in Tibet. (He abandoned his privileged lifestyle seven years earlier so he could travel the more unsavory regions of the globe and gain some insight into the criminal mind.) As he waits in line for his daily cup of gruel and crust of bread, some filthy cons take a go at him. Well, their bad. Wayne knocks them all into the middle of next week, but Nolan shoots the scene so tight and cuts it so randomly that you can’t tell what’s going on. (You long for the fluid, almost ballet-like precision with which Steven Spielberg choreographs his action scenes.) For the protection of the other inmates, Wayne is thrown into a private cell. There he meets Henri Ducard, a goateed and smartly dressed sage played by Liam Neeson. Ducard, who is cut from the same cloth as the Qui-Gon Jinn character Neeson played in Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace, helps Wayne confront his deepest fears and schools him in the arts of Ninjutsu, fencing, and needlepoint. While all this is going on, we jump back to Wayne’s childhood days and learn how his parents bought the farm. We also learn how he picked up his fear of bats and how he developed deep feelings for a self-righteous, high-handed little snot named Rachel Dawes. Dawes eventually becomes a lawyer played by Katie Holmes, and when she learns that Wayne attempted to do in the shitbag that offed his parents, she smacks him hard across his face and says, “Your father would be ashamed!” Yeah, it’s easy to assume the moral high ground when you never had to watch your mom and dad eat lead in front of you. 

After Wayne has completed his training, Ducard invites him to join the League of Shadows, a clandestine group of über-badasses that helps to restore the moral balance to cities that have gone the way of the Roman Empire. But when Wayne is commanded to perform an ethically dubious initiation rite, he beats the crud out of the Leaguers and burns their fortress to the ground. When he returns to Gotham, he finds that his city has become an even more wretched hive of scum and villainy than when he left it. The threat of assault or rape or murder lurks around every dark corner. And there’s no point looking to Johnny Law for help; corruption has permeated every level of the judicial system. The cops, the judges, the politicians, and the dogcatchers are all on the payroll of the mob bosses. Somebody has to stop all this shit, so Wayne decides to take his obsession with his parents’ deaths and channel it into something productive. He will make the scum of Gotham taste what he fears most: bats. 

Wayne’s chiroptophobia (not batophobia, which is the fear of standing next to large objects) stems from his childhood. One day while he was playing on the great lawn of the Wayne estate, he toppled into the entrance of a bat cave, provoking the winged beasties inside to swarm up and attack him. The resulting phobia made li’l Brucey want to duck out early on an opera featuring bat-like creatures, which led him and his parents to the theatre’s back alley just as a scurvy vagrant with thoughts of larceny was happening by. Now, as an adult, Wayne decides to confront his fear and revisit the bat cave. Using an extreme form of desensitization therapy, he allows hundreds if not thousands of screeching bats to encircle him. (It should be a stirring moment for the audience, but Nolan is incapable of making us feel anything other than a distant admiration for his technical prowess.) Having embraced his dread, Wayne makes the dark and musty grotto home to his crime-fighting alias. So, with the help of his every-loyal servant, Alfred (Michael Caine), he turns the cave into Batman’s base of operations. He then meets with Wayne Enterprises’ resident mad inventor, Lucius Fox (the beautiful Morgan Freeman), and secretly employs him to help with the development of a costume and weapons. He also takes the keys to Fox’s “Tumbler,” a monstrous and cumbersome whatchamacallit that makes the Hummer look sleek by comparison. Your heart just might sink when you realize that this ungodly tank-like thingy is going to become the Batmobile. One of my biggest gripes about Batman Begins is the uninspired design of its props and sets. I realize that Nolan wants to keep the movie from looking too much like a comic book, but shying away from the tone of the film’s source makes little sense. Everything here looks flat and dull. I longed for Burton’s Gotham, which was a glorious amalgamation of neo-Gothic architecture and Art-Deco statuary. Chicago stands in for Nolan’s Gotham. Yawn. 

Meanwhile, the CEO of Wayne Enterprises, William Earle (Rutger Hauer), is taking the company public, and Ms. Dawes has gone on to become an assistant district attorney and an even bigger bitch than before. She glowers and moans Marge Simpson-style at Wayne’s juvenile playboy antics, though a lot of the dopey stuff he does in public is to keep the press from ever confusing him with a heroic figure like Batman. There’s one scene where Wayne enters a posh eatery with a bimbo under each arm, but nothing comes of it. (Somebody forgot the punchline.) Not much comes of the film’s requisite super-villain either: Arkham Asylum’s fashion-conscious psychopharmacologist, Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy channeling James Spader), is using his patients as guinea pigs for his new “fear gas,” which makes anyone who inhales it see all sorts of ghastly images and go bonkers from fright. But when Dr. Crane wants to give a patient the blue-ribbon mind-fuck, he’ll shove a potato sack over his head and pretend he’s a scarecrow. (Yes, Bat-fans, it’s the chintziest depiction of a Batman heavy since… well, ever.) Dr. Crane is in cahoots with Ducard and the League of Shadows to take down Gotham by depositing the fear-inducing toxin into the city’s water supply. Ducard explains to Wayne (as he burns down his mansion) that things have become so bad in Gotham that the only way to make things right is to have the population do itself in. Looks like Batman has his work cut out for him, but he doesn’t have to go at it alone: He gets a little help from the city’s only incorruptible law enforcement agent, Sgt. James Gordon (very well played by Gary Oldman). Lots of action ensues, much of which is exciting but rarely exhilarating. The car chases and ass-whoopings turn out to be the least interesting part of the film—probably because they’re staged with no consideration for momentum or spatial logic. The first two acts of Batman Begins are rock solid, but the third act peters out due to Nolan’s aversion to climaxes. The score by James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer is consistently spot-on, though, as is the costume design by Lindy Hemming. 

When Batman, Robin, and Batgirl came running toward the camera in slow-motion at the end of Batman and Robin, I knew the franchise had jumped the proverbial shark. Batman Begins is just what we need to chase away the memories of Mr. Freeze’s groan-inducing puns, Batgirl’s chubby rear, and the nipples on Batman’s suit. But I hope Nolan will loosen up in the inevitable sequel and permit us to have a little more fun with the Dark Knight’s daring-do. And for God’s sake, Chris, give our guy a sexier car to race around in!* 

June 23, 2005 

*He didn’t.

“Batman Begins” Review. ©  Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.