Movies: Batman Gets a New Vehicle

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What is Batman afraid of? What might give the moody masked millionaire the primal shakes? The answer—and it's an easy one if you stop to think about it—is bats. Those furry, whirry creatures traumatized little Bruce Wayne when he was a kid. He has other, more guilt-edged issues, involving his saintly parents, as well. When we first meet Bruce (Christian Bale) as a grownup, he has traveled far (to Asia) and fallen low (a Chinese prison) in an attempt to restore wellness to his troubled soul. Specifically, he joins up with a bunch of muscular moralists known as the League of Shadows, whose leader (Liam Neeson in a really distracting mustache) imparts to him the will and skill to face his demons and, incidentally, go home and clean up Gotham, which has lapsed into Blade Runner-like disarray. Rutger Hauer, now more portly than androidesque, even turns up as a corporate smoothy.

Robin is not yet on the scene—guess he'll arrive in the next prequel—but Bruce is even more than usually asexual in this movie. So much cleansing to do, so little time to do it. Girls (or, for that matter, boys) are a distraction he can't afford. Whenever Katie Holmes, unwisely loving him, appears, he starts doing his Penguin imitation, perhaps understandably. There's the Bat Cave to tidy up, the Bat gear to invent (wry Morgan Freeman is helpful in that regard) and a bustling array of master and minor criminals to bring to justice.

For a while, Batman Begins is fitfully entertaining. Maybe the Force, with its ascetic demands, is too strong with our modern superheroes: enigmatic mind games are played as the karate chops fly. It may also be true that urban dystopia has become too much a ruling cliche in movie art direction. The weather in Gotham is perpetually inclement, and its garbage is forever uncollected.

In fairness, it must be said that the script (by director Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer) breaks with sobriety to give someone, usually Michael Caine as Alfred, Bruce's faithful, fussy butler, something smart to say. Eventually, however, Nolan, who directed the tricky, widely admired Memento, must oblige the conventions of the big-budget action movie: darkly improbable weaponry, pyrotechnics, car chases (the Batmobile is admittedly pretty novel), editing that edges toward incomprehensibility.

Basically, Nolan's job is to revive a troubled studio franchise, and you can feel him struggling to reanimate the neurotic dislocations of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman. His effort is not dishonorable, but what it needs, and doesn't have, is a Joker in the deck—some antic human antimatter to give it the giddy lift of perversity that a bunch of impersonal explosions, no matter how well managed, can't supply. —By Richard Schickel