It's a bird! It's a plane! No -- it's a flying squirrel!

Rating: 6/10 (13 August 2014)

It's reaching a point at which I no longer have any idea of what to make of these comic-book derived superhero movies. The budget must have been lavish. You ought to see Gotham. The glass boxes of yesteryear have become a little more baroque, so that Batman can swing from cartouche to Churrigueresque spatial decoration. Actually, he does do a lot of swinging, as well as zipping up and down, but he doesn't have to. He can leap from the top of a skyscraper and flutter his way elsewhere like a flying squirrel. Somewhere in the silent film archives is a short shot of a man jumping from a platform wearing a pair of wings strapped to his arms. He falls immediately to earth. Batman doesn't. He just make a loud fluttering noise, as of a bat. He also has a lot of gadget and an armor suit and what-not -- not including a gun -- that makes it possible for him to do impossible things.
Where did he learn his principles, after his mother and father were killed by a poor person in the bifurcated society of the future? And where did he pick up his mano-a-mano combat skills? And where did he find all those gadgets that make James Bond look like a tyro? Christian Bale got them from a host of first-rate supporting players, including Liam Neeson as his faux guru, Morgan Freeman as the custodian of armor and weapons too expensive to sell to the army, Gary Oldman as one of the few upright police officers in Gotham, and Michael Caine as the ever-helpful Alfred. Every one of them is splendid. Even the villainous parts -- Rutger Hauer, for instance -- are neatly delivered, and Cillian Murphy, as the psychiatrist who has developed a hallucinogenic substance to poison Gotham's water supply, is superbly prissy and haughty. Tom Wilkinson is fine too, as Carmine Falcone, one of the honchos who will bring the city to its delirious knees. I thought I saw John Hurt in the cast, but no -- a dead ringer. Katie Holmes is very nice to look at, with her cherubic face, but she isn't given much to do.
There is some mumbo jumbo about "finding your inner self" and all that. "In order to conquer fear you must become fear," intones Liam Neeson somewhere in Tibet. But the acting and the Philosophy for Dummies are all distractions for the real star of the movie -- the special effects. They've turned the Batmobile into what one cop describes hesitantly as "a tank." The visual effects are overwhelming. They are to the rest of the movie what a wrecking ball is to the abandoned tenement it destroys.
If you like special effects, especially those that reveal a city on which the sun never shines, although the rainfall is copious, this is your movie. You'll just have to sit through a little thoughtful advice on how to come to terms with your anger -- and you don't get the girl at the end, either.