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Tuesday, October 18, 2005
This Week's Hot Pick: 'Batman Begins'
A critic may question whether the world really needs another "Batman" movie, but the moribund franchise has been given a refreshing new spin by Christopher Nolan's dark, dazzling and engagingly original film.
It's a prequel to the four-film series of 1989-1997, opening with a vignette establishing how a childhood incident gave the young Bruce Wayne a pronounced bat phobia. After this fear inadvertently leads to the death of his parents, we jump a decade or so to find an adult Bruce (Christopher Bale) ensconced in a grubby Chinese prison. He has rescued the representative (Liam Neeson) of a secret vigilante brotherhood who takes him to the Himalayas and teaches him the martial arts and other quasimystical crime-fighting methods. But Bruce can't buy the group's reactionary methods, escapes their sanctuary and returns to Gotham. The rest of the movie chronicles how he uses his new skills to become Batman and go after the gangsters who have the city in their grip.
Nolan stages the film in a refreshing context of semireality, with a complex story -- about saving Gotham from a chemical holocaust, a grimly gothic vision of the crime-ridden city and a dandy pair of chase sequences and a range of innovative visual effects.
But it's not an action-o-rama and its best moments spark off the low-key charm of its ensemble of supporting actors: Neeson, Michael Caine, Tom Wilkinson, Morgan Freeman, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman. And, fine actor that he is, Bale runs away with the role of the young Caped Crusader. Although physically slight and borderline nerdy, his aura of troubled, focused intensity is just right, and he ends up being by far the most interesting, believable and oddly charismatic of all movie Batmen.
There are two DVD versions, a single disc with only the movie and a two-disc set with a spoof, 72-page comic book and several making-of featurettes. 140 minutes. Rated PG-13 for intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic elements. (William Arnold)
GRADE: A-
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