Deja vu

Rating: 3/10 (21 November 2005)

Here we go again: mean streets, concrete thickets, the huddled poor, oil drums burning in the cold dark night. Around any corner, Kurt Russell escaping or Harrison Ford running or Bruce Willis monkeying.
Say hello to the Gotham City of 'Batman Begins', where nothing works except the retread business and old scenes, old plots, old ideas and old ham are swapped for new with an alacrity so unblushing that the director should more properly have been a Mr Al Addin. Unfortunately though, there's no lamp for anyone to rub. So no chance of fulfilment of the not unreasonable wish that this silly movie come to an early end.
The good thing though is that the seemingly endless length of 'Batman Begins' leaves plenty of time to wonder. Or even, wander.
Michael Caine, for example, and this fondness he has for orphans. He may have swapped the cider house for the bat cave, but when he parts from young Bruce, he's just got to be thinking, 'Good night you Prince of Wayne, You New King of Gotham'.
And Peter Jackson. Although uncredited, you can really see the desperation when he comes chasing after one of the LOTR Nazguls that has galloped into Gotham to terrify the hobbits  correction, the Gotham City District Attorney (though played so convincingly here by Katie Holmes you just know she has hairy feet and enjoys smoking a clay pipe.)
David Carradine's absence is regrettable if only because Liam Neeson's presence is even more regrettable, but then, Carradine's character in the 1970s TV show was Kwai Chang Caine, and though 'Batman Begins' plunders as much as it can from earlier, more original, and infinitely better work, including 'Kung Fu', it's quite understandable that you can't have two Caines in one movie when one Caine has always been more than enough.
And then there's Christian Bale. Just how bad for his health is that Batman chest protector? Out of it, his larynx is fine. In it, and his voice drops way down to the Darth Vader register. (Katie Holmes's character doesn't notice this, but then, the actress herself doesn't notice that she's in a movie anyway).
Apparently, this 'new' (the word is used advisedly) Batman is so good, the franchise is to be extended. Plenty of time, then, to Marvel at the Comic intellectual pretensions of those who make / applaud stuff like this, and to watch every jaded visual cliché in the book being regurgitated.
In fact, by the time of 'Batman Ends' it's likely that audiences will be so into recycling that not a single Styrofoam cup will be left behind in any theatre, anywhere.
Hopefully, that which gets recycled won't, as in 'Batman Begins', emerge as junk.
Rating: 3/10 (for Bale's efforts).