Batman for the Coldplay generation.

Rating: 4/10 (19 June 2005)

The moral absolutes of comic-book movies have never seemed so relevant as now, as Star Wars: Episode III and Sin City brilliantly showed ( Yellow Bastard's castration will go down in history as the great shared moment of anti-Bush catharsis. ) But Christopher Nolan's dreadfully earnest Batman Begins is too obvious in its attempts to draw parallels with America's current malaise, and may ultimately tip the scales back to Joel Schumacher's neon-ribbed codpieces. Nolan strikes me as a calculating, soulless filmmaker who should be making movies about Rubber Man, as he twists himself into a Superpretzel trying to please the comic-book mavens, the intellectuals, the Friday-night date crowd, the SUV driving suburbanites, the sensitive artistes AND the action fans. But a Batman movie is not the place for him to trot out his knowledge of German literature and philosophy ( Novalis and Nietzsche, primarily. ) It sort of reminds me of all those Yale grads who end up writing sitcoms and Pixar animated features, and who drop various arcane references in order to pretend to themselves that they haven't sold out. This movie may seem to have integrity at first, but a closer examination will reveal just how made-by-committee it is.
What really torpedoes the project, though, is something much simpler -- Nolan has no style, no juice, no cinematic blood in his veins. Did anyone really want to see a Batman movie directed by Sidney Lumet? Who wants to see anonymous drug-runners, cops with greasy mustaches and dull British character actors in this kind of movie? The only supervillian, The Scarecrow, is played by 20-something Cillian Murphy, and his scenes with the equally juvenile Katie Holmes make the audience feel as if they're sitting in on a laid-back acting class on Santa Monica Boulevard. There is a lack of imagination in the action scenes that will become fatally apparent to even the most impressed fans once they get this movie on DVD. This film is born to collect dust. There's not one memorable setpiece in the entire movie, nothing like the museum sequence in Burton's Batman that could put this over the top -- just lots of generic karate shot close-in. The big showdown at the end is like something out of the Speed movies.
Ang Lee's version of Hulk -- the underrated trailblazer among the Serious Comic Book Movies, and the one that will stand the test of time -- is the perfect marriage of pop thrills and myth-savvy credibility. Almost every scene is memorable, from Hulk's eerily quiet rageout in in the desert, to his Shakespeareanly wordy confrontation with father Nick Nolte. It not only starts out as realistic and plausible as this Batman, but has the courage to plunge into the irrational and abstract at the end. Batman Begins, by contrast, is a dead weight, a humorless 70's cop show tarted up with cod philosophy.