Loading ...Movie Review - Batman Begins
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(1 votes, average: 4 out of 4)
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2005 / 141 Minutes / PG-13
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz
“Batman and Robin” was bad. Really bad. How bad was it? Well, it was so bad that critics are practically stampeding each other in their haste to heap praise on this film.
Don’t get me wrong, this film has a lot of really good qualities. Some great qualities, even. And it’s a hell of a lot better than “Batman and Robin” (then again, aside from notable exceptions like “Son of the Mask”, most films are). And…well, okay, it’s actually a pretty good flick. It does, however, have some major problems, and I’m not about to gloss them over.
The plot of the film is the origins of Batman. There have been at least four films made on this particular comic book hero and, until now, not a one of them have covered the ground that led to Bruce Wayne becoming Batman. We’ve seen his parents get shot, sure, and I think we even saw him fall into some neon-lit cave of bats in that one Schumacher joint (“Batman Forever”, maybe). But we haven’t seen his martial arts tutelage, or seen how he designed and fabricated the suit, or gotten to know his parents and understand the loss that he’s felt, we haven’t gotten a real appreciation for the hole that early event left in his soul and psyche. “Batman Begins” navigates all this territory. Finally, we get to see how he befriended James Gordon (and even understand how that man became a commissioner a little better). We see why he chose the bat for his symbol. We get to see how he got the Batmobile and where it came from. (The Batmobile in this film looks like a Hummer from Hell and it sounds like a car geek’s wet dreams all come true. I had some doubts about it from the trailer, but it’s hella cool.) In short, we get to see all the stuff that we might always have wondered about and it’s all pretty damned cool to see.
The origins of Batman are explored in great detail here, and all of this stuff works absolutely magnificently. The buildup to Batman’s emergence is exceptional, and all of the actors do their best. Considering that these actors are Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Rutger Hauer, Tom Wilkinson and Michael Caine, their best is considerable. Caine, in particular, takes the thankless role of Alfred and makes it, perhaps, the most interesting role in the film. He finds angles of Alfred’s performance that I did not know existed. I was initially worried that he might overwhelm the role, that he was too good an actor for Alfred. What I did not know was that Alfred was a great character who deserved better than he’d always gotten. Alfred really shines here, thanks to the great writing of Christopher Nolan and David Goyer and the regal talent of Michael Caine. Oldman does the same with the thankless role of Lt. Gordon. Gary Oldman is always great (in my opinion) but it’s fun to see him reinvent a character you thought you knew all about. It’s riveting stuff. And Christian Bale is easily the best Batman/ Bruce Wayne since Michael Keaton. He might even be better, though I hesitate even to suggest such a thing. He’s a different sort of Batman, and a more messed up Bruce Wayne. Wayne obviously has some problems, and not all of them get exorcised when he slips into the famous rubber suit. I’m not sure why he ends up in an Asian prison camp at the beginning of the film (the explanation for that is pretty flimsy) but oh well.
The origin story, in other words, is nearly brilliant. The murder of Bruce’s parents is not quite as haunting as it was in Burton’s “Batman” and the way that the filmmakers screw with the sequence of events in the film’s first half hour felt wrong to me. I felt it would have worked better if they had just shown these events in sequential order. Otherwise, this part of the movie is just about perfect. And Bale is truly menacing as Batman. He’s a detective, he’s an ass-kicker, he’s a ghost, he’s a legend, he’s anything he has to be in order to get the job done, and he’s really intimidating throughout.
As good as the actors and origin story are, however, the film drops the ball on a couple of major issues. First of all, the villains and their plot are fairly flimsy. One of the major complaints that most people had about the last couple of Batman films (prior to this one) was that there were too many villains and that tipped the balance of the films. Well, this one has as many villains as the last two movies, maybe even one more, and as a result the movie spreads itself too thin. Had it focused on a single villain, it might have been more effective, more streamlined. As is, it’s all over the map at certain points. It’s so schizophrenic that there’s a major plot hole at the end (a HUGE plot hole, as in a certain necessary thing is not only left unresolved but essentially forgotten about) and the movie doesn’t even seem to notice. The action sequences are also pretty chaotic. The first couple of times we saw Batman kick a lot of ass in a lot of random cuts, I thought it was kinda neat. We were seeing Batman’s attacks the way that the bad guys were seeing them, seeing how intense and quick they were. But after while, it began to bother me. I wanted to see how Bruce was making use of his training. I wanted to see what, exactly, he was doing. I wanted to see why he was so effective. Also, the final action sequence is rather ludicrous and anticlimactic. The end of this movie is a little too open-ended.
It’s not a bad film, and parts of it are as good as any comic book movie has ever been. In fact, it never really feels like a comic book movie. No one other comic book movie has ever taken its story and characters this deadly seriously. But the serious tone can only cover the ludicrousness of certain things for so long, and it can only pardon a finite number of sins. Not only that, but the film never loosens up. It never gives Batman any breathing room.
Personally, I prefer Burton’s original “Batman”. It was just as dark (maybe darker), and it was a lot more fun.
