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Batman's biggest enemy: this movie
Christian Bale
Warner Bros. Pictures
Director: Christopher Nolan
Stars: Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson
MPAA rating: PG-13, for intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic elements
Hype and curiosity alone will launch it profitably. But you sit there for two hours and 20 minutes thinking, "What were they thinking?"
Half of it is glum enough to recall "The Hulk," which self-destructed without generating a franchise, and the rest is so generic an action film that Batman's individuality evaporates. Using technological equipment, he flies freely. But that diminishes his mortality and reduces our concerns about his vulnerability.
Though made by Warner Bros., the studio that released Batman movies in 1989, 1992, 1995 and 1997, "Batman Begins" ignores their existence. Fair enough; we're beginning at the beginning.
Director Christopher Nolan, whose "Memento" and the American version of "Insomnia" were unusually imaginative, co-wrote the screenplay with story creator David S. Goyer (the "Blade" trilogy).
They sketch in the boyhood of Bruce Wayne (Gus Lewis as a child, Christian Bale thereafter) and, in a ludicrously poor scene, show how his millionaire-industrialist father Thomas (Linus Roache) was slain. Excuse me, but when cultivated people like the Waynes leave an opera house mid-performance, they do not exit into an alley.
The childhood stuff is crosscut with scenes set a decade or more later, when Bruce is in Asia -- Bhutan to be precise -- being beaten in a godforsaken prison and rescued by Ducard (Liam Neeson).
Ducard has peculiarly brutal methods of teaching the young man martial arts, samurai techniques and eastern mysticism.
Ken Watanabe appears as Ducard's ally, Ra's Al Ghul, leader of a highfalutin' vigilante army called The League of Shadows, but Watanabe seems awfully like he's appearing in outtakes from "The Last Samurai."
The backstory of fantasy character Bruce Wayne consumes a full hour, all of it dark and humorless, which, if nothing else, is consistent with the 80 minutes still to be navigated back in Gotham.
Bruce becomes re-enamored with childhood crush Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), now an assistant D.A., and befriends Det. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and high-tech equipment wizard Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman).
Faithful valet Alfred (Michael Caine) has been hanging loose for something like 15 years awaiting Bruce's return.
Bruce will meet such scoundrels as Earle (Rutger Hauer), who has been running Wayne Enterprises, gangster Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) and devious Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), who doubles as the burlap-masked Scarecrow.
Bruce does not, however, take in any wards -- Boy Robin or otherwise.
Give "Batman Begins" this: It pays at least lip service, but no more, to the realistic crime problem of drugs. It's then dismissed as the crime du jour -- a merely announced reason to go after Falcone.
For a movie that exhausts itself creating a psychological background for a fantasy character, it is as subservient as its many counterparts to explosions, fires, murky fight scenes, quick cutting and countless sound blasts.
It uses noise as a weapon against the audience, fearing the very short attention span it feeds through the use of such crutches.
