A "review" of Batman Begins

Batman Begins perhaps should have been called Batman Rebooted. It is a fresh, albeit faithful, reinterpretation of the Caped Crusader mythos. And if you're a die hard fanboy, the little things are going to get you.

If, for example, you were bothered that Clark Kent's father died in the 1978 Superman movie but was alive in the Lois & Clark series, then stuff about Batman Begins is going to crawl under your skin and chew at your guts instead of letting you get into the story.

As for the story itself? Well, there seems to be so much of it that the movie really races through as much as it can before it has to stop to drop some hints and foreshadowing of things to come. Bruce Wayne travels to the Orient and learns kung fu: this is a fact. This fact appears in the film. But his training, while a substantial part of the early part of the film, feels awkward and out of place. The timeline is as follows:

parents murdered > go to the Orient for some reason > learn kung fu > fight crime in Gotham

Batman Begins is flawed, but only if you insist on pointing out the intricate ways in which it differs from the comics, from the animated series, and from the Tim Burton films. I think there's a viable reason for why, after years of searching the world to find enlightenment, Bruce Wayne would be capable of walking down to the general store to use the phone and having his private jet flown to meet him at an airstrip somewhere in the Himalayas. I don't think I could tell you what that reason is, but my guess is "it's time for the movie to progress".

The film has a very schizophrenic feel to it. One minute you're high in the mountains watching Bee Dub go through his assassin training. The next, he's back at Wayne Manor and he's found a giant bat cave that isn't reeking of guano. Then, he's fixin' to make himself a batsuit and take down the mob boss Falcone. Hooray! Batman beats thugs, and the movie ends, right? Wrong. The movie jumps track yet again and now there's a missing piece of Wayne Enterprises-manufactured experimental ordinance.

This secretive superweapon doesn't even warrant a cursory investigative nod by the Dark Knight: he's too busy trying to figure out what Dr. Crane is doing to his patients at Arkham Asylum. (That's Jonathan Crane, not Frasier Crane.) Those who appreciate the Batman mythos will take an immediate dislike to the actor who plays Crane: he's simply too pretty. He looks more like an emo eyewear model than a psychiatrist. We get to see Crane become the supervillain Scarecrow, and we know he's supposed to be both Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman all at once. Instead, this Crane is a smarmy pill-pusher, somebody you wouldn't want to share an elevator ride with for a whole slew of reasons, not the least of which involves a hallucinogenic fear-inducing toxin.

Fortunately, the film gives us an apologetic nod to those who have been slighted by the poor casting of Cillian Murphy as Crane: we are treated to a brief scene of Scarecrow, now thoroughly demented on his own gas, riding a horse that has scarlet eyes and breathes fire. Tres sexy.

Like I said, Batman Begins is reinterpretation. Director Christopher Nolan tears down everything we know and love about Batman and reinvents it all from square one. Want to see how Bruce makes his famous bat-eared cowl? Bull's eye. The first batarang? That's in there. It's all in there, sometimes at a dizzying pace; it just may not be exactly how you remember it being: parents gunned down? Yes. By Jack Napier? No. Batman Begins is yet another retcon, and if you're going to see a movie based on a long-running comic book series, you should be used to this by now. (Rumor has it the upcoming Fantastic Four movie involves them getting their powers by winning a Pepsi under-the-cap contest and then fighting Doctor Dehydration.)

I think that Christian Bale was absolutely spot-fucking-on as Bruce Wayne, but significantly lacking as Batman. He fits into the playboy millionaire role here just as smoothly as he fit into it in American Psycho. At one point, Bruce is in a restaurant sitting across from infamous mob boss Carmine Falcone, who has just pushed a gun in his face. "I am surrounded by powerful public figures, and yet I could shoot you in the face and they wouldn't even blink," says Falcone. "That is power you cannot buy." And I was just hoping against all hope that Bale's Bruce Wayne would suavely reply with "Do you like Genesis, Mr. Falcone?"

Sadly, where Patrick Bateman was an impulsive lunatic, Bruce Wayne is the silent and stewing "I'll get you later" type of sociopath. He's content to, oh, I don't know, leave Gotham and slum around Asia for a few years before coming to his senses and avenging his parents' deaths. Time and again in this film, a character's motivations are murky at best. Bruce Wayne fights crime with a mask. Is it because he wants revenge he can never have? Maybe. The film gives a double message. Revenge is bad, but revenge is also good. Or perhaps wanting revenge is bad, but getting revenge under the guise of niceness and good is OK. Furthermore, there is a great deal of ambiguity surrounding the League of Shadows and why they do what they do, but I'll forgive this just once because the League obviously has great interest in concealing with the left hand what is revealed in the right.

The quick action sequences fail to make up for the hectic mish-mash of plotlines and characterizations. Batman Begins is two movies disguised as one: a coming of age tale combined with a Ridley Scott "future noir" detective story, stitched together with a weak-as-water C-plot involving corporate malfeasance in the highest echelons of Wayne Enterprises's senior staff. My final diagnosis: Batman Begins looks pretty and stays remarkably true to the source, but is missing some kind of spark in the script that all the actors show in their faces. In scene after scene, their eyes are saying "Uh. What next?" The ultimate flaw in Batman Begins is the poor characterizations: even Bruce Wayne isn't sure why he's doing what he's doing. That should speak volumes to the cautious movie-goer.