Post-industrial vistas, gob-smacked policemen, and more great-city-in-jeopardy business . . . Begins is a satisfactory retread, if not a complete return to form.

Rating: 5/10 (21 June 2005)

Following on from such rival efforts as Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000), Ang Lee's Hulk (2003), and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002), studio Warner Bros puts its hat into the ring with a different breed of superhero, in its attempt to make amends for the woeful Catwoman (2004), and importantly to pave the way for a lucrative summer 2006 season with Singer's Superman Returns. A deeply embroiled tale about the formative years of its protagonist, the film is worlds apart in tone to Raimi's glamorous precedent-setter of 2002, but achieves just as much success with a varied cast, and above average script.
Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins expends the bulk of its narrative originality and bite in its long opening first act, a tightly-wound veritable bundle of familial and romantic intimacy, tragic personal loss, and the much more palatable triumph of the almost-superhuman over mere humans. In the space of its first half hour, a revolutionary supply of dark and psychologically rich material is made available, but the result sometimes leans towards the saccharine. Overly eager, for instance, to explore the pre-adolescent's nightmare of suffering terrible, instantaneous change (thrust upon the child Bruce Wayne here via the trauma of his parent's murder, but more to the point the subsequent wasted efforts to satisfactorily reprimand the killer), Nolan peppers the early section of his film with the trademark Oedipal/patriarchal concerns of the standard action-adventure blockbuster, but without retaining some of the distinctive identity of his previous Insomnia (2002) or Memento (1999). Familial relations are thus developed in crudely superficial terms, so that the result is often a collection of fairly anonymous, sitcom-style vignettes.
Once Begins projects itself forward into the present, and charts Christian Bale's (the now mature Bruce Wayne) attempts to better comprehend the criminal mind, the film slips in to the kind of slick, masterly form its marketing campaign has been hotly promising audiences throughout the summer. In fact, the male ascendancy and initiation ritual, largely dramatised here for the most part in China where Bale perfects the art of unarmed self-defence, is clearly well on a par with that of Russell Crowe's General Maximus in Gladiator (2000), or even that which occupied Keanu Reeves's Neo in the original The Matrix from 1999, so that one is caught on several occasions deeply engrossed in the protagonist's struggle to assert and perfect the self as he works perilously towards the final coming-of-age ritual execution of an unarmed prisoner, an act which we know ultimately he can never perform. But like Mary Harron in 2000's American Psycho, director Nolan's reluctance to stray from the commercially safe material and structuring of the blockbuster only fails to mark as untrue the suspicion that both filmmakers maintain a troubling lack of confidence in Bale's abilities. Like the bitterly hilarious and simultaneously upsetting final monologue in Psycho (when he confesses his sins to his lawyer's answer machine), Bale only has the one rare scene to properly convey the adult Bruce Wayne's overwhelming sense of desperate alienation. The bulk of his suffering is given over instead to child-actor Gus Lewis in a number of flashbacks which begin when Bale recounts past events in the extended prologue.
Indeed, while hardly encumbered with unique opportunities to variously convey psychological depth, Bale's scenes are at least more palpable than the myriad ensemble pieces charitably donated to its support cast. Having appeared in The Phantom Menace (1999) and this year's Kingdom of Heaven as something of a masterly swordsman, Liam Neeson is a credibly rough and surly-mannered tutor/paterfamilias until the Gotham-based bloodletting begins, while the previously well-acclaimed Ken Watanabe (as another sword-wielding artist in Ed Zwick's The Last Samurai, 2003) is here apportioned strictly Hitchcockian MacGuffin duties as League of Shadows master, Ra's Al Ghul. The attempts to project a credible and liberated woman in Raimi's overwhelming commercial successes Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 (2004), appears not to have rubbed off on screenwriter David Goyer (Blade), who assembles elements of Julia Roberts's DA in Conspiracy Theory (1997) and even Kim Basinger's reporter from the original Batman (1989) to conjure for Katie Holmes the bland, sexless Rachel Dawes. It's precisely the sort of role which is remarkably disproportionate in size to the heavy levels of media attention lavished upon the actress in these tabloid-obsessed, pre-War of the Worlds times.
It is the conventionally progressive storyline and the officially-sanctioned acceptance of Batman into the police system through the sympathetic figure of Gordon (all too rapid, and all too easy) which rather worryingly for comic-book fans may be perceived to repeat identical narrative arcs belonging to Tim Burton's original film. Given this, the filmmaker's (and arguably less so, the studio) efforts to distance their 'new' production from the Burton and Schumacher sequels feel for the most part largely wasted. Still, there's just about enough here to applaud than there is to deplore (the film merited some applause at the screening I attended), which makes it even more of a shame that studio Warner Bros could care less from this point on in which direction the franchise heads. Stripped of the attention-holding training sequences in China and the refreshing tormented malice of its central protagonist, Begins is essentially the same old grand commercial concept, and seems ultimately to be no more sinister, or more revolutionary, than its main big-feature predecessors. And yet, given the clear and dynamic conflicts set up throughout between such seemingly clear-cut concepts as normal and abnormal, good and evil, victim and aggressor, Nolan has suitably paved the way to explore these tormenting struggles in future works.