DVD Town Reviews Batman Begins

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By now, you´ve probably seen the early reviews that declare "Batman Begins" to be the best adaptation of a comic-book series about a superhero. You´ve also seen the reviews that give the movie four (out of four) stars. You might think that you´re seeing evidence of a great movie. What you´re really seeing is over-praise stemming from relief that someone made a "Batman" movie for adults. Unfortunately, taking its make-believe world seriously doesn´t automatically make "Batman Begins" a home run. If anything, the fact that "Batman Begins" is so serious makes it all the more disappointing that the final product is undone by inappropriate humor and impatience indicative of a lack of storytelling maturity.

"Batman Begins" is a break from all previous motion-picture adaptations of the Batman story. Director Christopher Nolan and screenwriter David S. Goyer (he of the "Blade" series) start at the beginning with Batman´s origins. Bruce Wayne sees his parents murdered right in front of him, and he grows up with a lot of rage and fear. His world-wide travels lead him to Henri Ducard, Ra´s Al Ghul, and a group known as the League of Shadow Warriors. The Shadow Warriors fancy themselves to be guardians of justice, but Wayne doesn´t want to be a vigilante. Wayne´s split from the Shadow Warriors yields serious repercussions when he returns to Gotham City. In Gotham, Wayne is re-united with Rachel Dawes, the daughter of a former Wayne-family servant. Dawes is now an Assistant District Attorney who tries to combat crime in a city overrun by corruption.

My favorite sequences involve the charming meetings between Wayne and an inventor who provides him with gadgets that enable Batman to take flight. Not only do these sequences echo the witty banter between 007 and Q in the James Bond movies, they also make Batman´s existence plausible. This movie grounds Batman´s hardware in reality rather than in fanciful movie designs that arise out of nothing as seen in previous "Batman" big-screen outings.

Tim Burton´s "Batman" (1989) and "Batman Returns" were criticized for being too dark and violent. This movie is far darker and more violent than any other adaptation of a comic-book superhero story. In fact, it is disturbing and depressing. The Scarecrow alone is a frightening creation out of the horror genre. Unlike Michael Keaton´s portrayal, this Bruce Wayne is damaged almost to the point of being pathological. This Batman is not so much a hero as he is simply the movie´s protagonist. We can´t really cheer for anyone else, so we root for the guy who says that he´s fighting evil, conveniently ignoring that he himself is a few steps away from crossing the line.

The movie´s greatest strength is its casting. When you look at other superhero movies, usually only the two or three most-important characters are played by stars or decent actors with gravitas. "Batman Begins" is populated by so many great performers that scheduling all these wonderful actors was an estimable feat itself. Christian Bale has been a forceful presence since his appearance in Steven Spielberg´s "Empire of the Sun" during the 1980s, and he carries the central role with emotional, psychological, and physical conviction. Michael Caine (Alfred the Butler), Cillian Murphy (Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka The Scarecrow), Gary Oldman (Detective Jim Gordon, not yet the police commissioner), Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox, an inventor at Wayne Enterprises), Liam Neeson (Henri Ducard), Ken Watanabe (Ra´s Al Ghul), Tom Wilkinson (Carmine Falcone, an "old school" Mafia-type gangster), and Rutger Hauer (the guy who runs Wayne Enterprises after Bruce Wayne´s parents are murdered) make the movie feel like an Oscar contender. Murphy in particular is very effective as a smugly creepy villain. (In fact, his supercilious style reminded me of a lot of "academics" I met while at Chapman University.) Even Bruce Wayne´s father is played by an actor, Linus Roache, who elicits genuine sympathy as a decent man who is quite possibly one of the best screen patriarchs ever.

The only miscast part was Rachel Dawes. Katie Holmes is only a marginal actress, and her face is all wrong for the part. When she smiles, only the right side of her face curls up. Therefore, she appears to be smirking rather than smiling. Also, her right eye is noticeably smaller than her left one, so when she really smiles, Holmes looks deformed. In short, Holmes does not look like a hero´s love interest.

Like so many "high concept" Hollywood packages, "Batman Begins" is extremely overplotted. Batman has to fight so many different enemies, court so many women, close so many business deals, and develop so many weapons that his life becomes one big mess. This means that the individual plot strands aren´t as well-developed as they could´ve been had the script narrowed its focus and given the audience time and space to absorb Batman´s universe. Indeed, given the number of things that happen in the movie, "Batman Begins" feels like a connect-the-dots exercise like "Star Wars: Episode III". Why do prequels and origin stories feel the need to rush through highlights?

The editing is really sloppy and is much to fast for its own good. In one scene, Ducard breaks some ice beneath Wayne´s feet, and we barely get a glimpse of Wayne falling into freezing waters before the movie cuts to the next scene. During the fights, shots are so brief that I couldn´t make sense of what was happening. Coupled with extremely tight camera shots, the editing made me stop caring about how the action sequences were developing because it wasn´t possible to discern build-ups or changes in fortune.

Twice, Alfred the butler is the source of stupid jokes. In one scene, two caterers at a birthday party see Alfred clumsily putting Rachel in the back of a car. The caterers give him weird looks, prompting Alfred to say something inane. Later, after clubbing a bad guy in the back of the head, Alfred says, "I hope you weren´t part of the fire brigade." The line was so bad that the audience just sat there in stunned silence.

The lousy and instantly-forgettable music score deserves attention because the music scores for "Batman" (1989), "Spider-man", and "Hulk" are all so fantastic. Okay, I know that Danny Elfman wrote the scores for the three movies that I mentioned, but Elfman is someone who knows how to compose catchy themes and leitmotifs. The score for "Batman Begins" is credited to James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer, and when two blokes can´t come up with something memorable, then your money was wasted.

Inevitably, one compares sequels and "re-imaginings" to their originals. How does "Batman Begins" stack up against its cinematic predecessors? I would say that it´s better than "Batman Forever" and "Batman & Robin", though it´s also much less of an achievement than Tim Burton´s "Batman" and "Batman Returns". Burton´s movies did not have confusing rapid-fire editing, and they were not overplotted to the point of being crushed by narrative details. Most importantly, they had plenty of quiet moments that allowed their characters to breathe and inhabit Gotham City. With "Batman Begins", you get a lot of angry people running around beating up on each other. This ultimately buries Bale´s complex performance beneath a pile of sound and fury that, yes, signifies nothing.

"Batman Begins" gets a lot of things right. Unfortunately, what it gets wrong can not be either forgiven or forgotten. This makes the movie a missed opportunity worth seeing, but considering how depressing and disturbing it is, I for one will not be subjecting myself to it again soon.

On DVD Town´s ten-scale, I rate "Batman Begins" a "6".

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