director
Christopher Nolan
screenwriters
Christopher
Nolan
David S. Goyer
story by
David S.
Goyer
based on
characters created by
Bob Kane
producers
Larry J. Franco
Charles Roven
Emma Thomas
cinematographer
Wally Pfister
music
James Newton Howard
Hans Zimmer
editor
Lee Smith
cast
Christian Bale (Bruce Wayne/Batman)
Michael Caine (Alfred)
Liam Neeson (Ducard)
Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox)
Katie Holmes (Rachel Dawes)
Gary Oldman (Jim Gordon)
Cillian Murphy (Dr. Jonathan Crane)
Tom Wilkinson (Carmine Falcone)
Rutger Hauer (Earle)
Ken Watanabe (Ra's Al Ghul)
Mark Boone Junior (Flass)
Linus Roache (Thomas Wayne)
Rade Serbedzija (Homeless Man)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 137m
u.s.
release: 6/15/05
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official website
other christopher
nolan films
reviewed on this website:
- insomnia
- memento
see also:
- batman
forever
- batman and robin
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Pre-sold to skeptical fans
and non-fans alike as a more "serious" take on a vigilante
who dresses up as a bat, Batman Begins -- presumably
the start of a trilogy in which Batman Continues and Batman
Concludes will follow -- kicks off promisingly enough. Bruce
Wayne (Christian Bale), the billionaire orphan whose parents
were gunned down by a mugger, has gotten himself tossed into
a squalid Chinese jail, where he takes his rage out on his fellow
prisoners. A mysterious figure named Ducard (Liam Neeson, who
seems to have resigned himself to playing mentors for the rest
of his career) springs Bruce from prison and indoctrinates him
into a secret order known as the League of Shadows. It's here
that Bruce learns not only combat but the quality of mercy: Killing
criminals, he reasons, makes us no better than them. So Bruce
returns to the vice-ridden streets of Gotham, taking a bat --
bats frightened him as a boy -- as his power animal. He becomes
Batman, scourge of the criminal element.
Some of this may sound familiar
(the murdered parents), some not (everything else). Batman
Begins strains mightily, at least for its first two-thirds,
to be a Batman movie for people who don't like Batman
movies. (Considering the awfulness of the previous two, Batman Forever and Batman
and Robin, it's fair to say Batman lost a lot
of the cred he built up in Tim Burton's two Bat-entries and in
Frank Miller's groundbreaking comics.) Director Christopher Nolan,
who wrote the script with Blade
scripter David S. Goyer, lays a halfway plausible framework for
Batman's expertise, his mission, and even his gadgets: Lucius
Fox (Morgan Freeman), a sort of Q to Bruce's James Bond, supplies
him with body armor, grappling hooks, and a bitchin' new Batmobile.
"Where does he get those wonderful toys?" asked
Jack Nicholson's Joker in Burton's 1989 Batman; well,
now we know.
The movie takes such time and
care to set up Bruce/Batman that it's a bit of a bummer when
it launches into summer-movie overdrive. We're given two villains
-- mobster Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) and shady psychiatrist
Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy) -- who turn out to be mere pawns
in an overall scheme that makes very little sense. Also, the
murder of Bruce's parents is tied into said scheme, a large mistake:
The whole point of Bruce's trauma is that his parents were gunned
down randomly, because they were in the wrong alley at
the wrong time, and Batman is born out of the need to protect
others from becoming random statistics. I grow weary of movies
that feel compelled to tie everything together in a neat little
bow (even Burton's 1989 film did it, with the Joker turning out
to be the one who killed Bruce's parents, but at least there
it was used as part of the film's Joker-created-Batman, Batman-created-Joker
symmetry).
Along about the second hour,
Batman Begins abandons whatever grim realism it has constructed,
collapsing into scenes of chaos in which Batman is more like
damage control than like the world's greatest detective he's
supposed to be. Gary Oldman, as clean cop James Gordon, is underused;
so is Katie Holmes as Bruce's love interest, but I didn't mind
that, since Holmes hasn't progressed much as an actress beyond
Dawson's Creek. Nolan,
whose thrillers Memento and
Insomnia were justifiably
acclaimed, seems at sea here. Unlike Burton, who brought a Gothic-carnival
sensibility to his Batman films, and even Joel Schumacher,
whose neon-campy reworking of Batman was ludicrous but at least
his own, Nolan brings no particular vision to Batman Begins.
The style is best described as portentous nonstyle: glum, drab,
bland. And Nolan sure isn't an action director. The first scenes
of Batman on the prowl go by in a blur, which makes sense because
we're experiencing him the way his terrified, disoriented criminal
victims do. But later on, when there's no longer any reason for
it, the fight scenes are still shot far too close in and
edited so sloppily we have no idea what's happening.
The casting of Christian Bale,
so memorably and hilariously batshit in American
Psycho, as perhaps the most psychologically dodgy
comic-book hero in history promises more than you get. Bale's
best moments here, when Bruce playacts as a drunken playboy to
throw off suspicion, recall his work as Patrick Bateman, but
elsewhere we need to feel that Bruce is driven and a little crazy,
and we don't. This Bruce seems like more of a put-out frat boy
than an obsessed loner trying to impose sense on a senseless
city. And in the Bat-suit, he's pretty much interchangeable with
everyone else who's worn it, with the addition of a meant-to-be-spooky
Bat-voice. Both this film and the 1989 film have the caped crusader
deliver the same pivotal line. Michael Keaton said "I'm
Batman," but managed to invest it with a trace of self-mocking
wit, enjoying striking fear in his prey: "Yeah, I'm Batman,
that's me," he seemed to be saying; "pretty cool, huh?"
Bale grunts "I'm Batman!" and punctuates it with a
head-butt. As soon as I saw that, I knew that this might be the
Batman movie Roger Ebert was waiting for (as he wrote),
but it's not the one I was waiting for.
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