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Batman Begins June 19, 2005 |
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Why is it that superheroes are always more interesting than their civilian identities? Peter Parker is something of a lovesick dweeb compared to the high-flying Spider-Man. Clark Kent is an anonymous newspaper desk jockey when not kicking major bad guy behind and avoiding Kryptonite as Superman. And Bruce Wayne, for all his dashing upper-class bravado and give-a-hang good looks, is little more than a spoiled child seeking revenge when he dons his Batman rubber suit to patrol the night in Gotham City. The best theory I can come up with is that comic book writers see themselves in the civilian clothes, and they don’t like what they see, so they make their fantasy self (strong, aerial, heroic) so fantastic the original mortal comes off as slightly uninteresting and occasionally boring. Of the three, only Parker has had his evolution brought to life in stunning cinematic glory (Kent in “Superman” is cool, but nothing beats the progression made with “Spider-Man 2” last year), but now it’s Wayne’s time to shine, or, more appropriately, brood to no end through the early stages of his life, as “Batman Begins” tells us everything we thought we wanted to know about the man who would become a giant crime fighting bat, that wasn’t already covered in the previous movies, comics, and TV shows. The result is an overlong, overblown, and ultimately brutally unsatisfying hybrid of flashback character development, glossy yet dark action sequences, drab dialogue, and a story line hatched from the psychologist’s handbook on domestic terrorism, primarily, fanatical social progress fueled through symbolism and fear. Somewhere in this mess is the story of a superhero, but it’s so cluttered with seriousness and confusion that Batman gets lost to questions and clichés, and it’s entirely frustrating. Directed by the visually adept Christopher Nolan, whose last film, “Insomnia”, was one of the best psychological cop thrillers of the past twenty years, “Batman Begins” is structured with a classical three act arch, with flashbacks serving as the primary source of storytelling in the first act, and linear comic book heroic storytelling concluding the second, and horror-filled third acts. The story begins somewhere in Asia, as an out-of-circulation Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, best known as the killer in “American Psycho”) is training in a criminal labor camp, when a mysterious stranger named Ducard (Liam Neeson, light years away from “Kinsey”) takes him out to go train further with Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) and his crime hating League of Shadows. Ducard knows Wayne is a talented fighter, fueled by the anger he harbors from watching his parents’ murder as a young boy, and believes he can lead the League, if only he can focus. “Your anger gives you great powers,” he says, “but if you let it, it will destroy you, as it did me.” If you can imagine such a line being delivered either before or after an intense Kung-Fu fight, with all the seriousness of a Bergman drama, than you can grasp the tone of this film, which is dark, dark, dark, and littered with allusions to fear and panic. “To conquer fear,” says Ducard, my final example, “you must become fear.” Basically, that means reemerging into society as Bruce Wayne, secretly donning the superhero suit your father had stashed away, for some reason that’s never clear, and ridding the crumbling and corrupt Gotham City of crumb-bums and corruption. There are a few problems I have with “Batman Begins” that far outweigh Nolan’s good sense of composition and exciting action sequences. The first is that the villains are boring, with Tom Wilkinson’s Mafia Don Carmine Falcone a snooze, and Cillian Murphy equally as perplexingly staid as his master, a psychologist named Crane who frequently throws on a burlap mask, calls himself the Scarecrow, and shoots weaponized hallucinogenic mist at his enemies. The basis of acts two and three concern Crane’s diabolical plan to dump the material into Gotham’s water supply- with the help of an old enemy of Wayne’s- to cause a mass panic in the streets. “24” did something like this with a virus and an L.A. hotel a few years ago, and it was much more frightening and plausible. Neither of these crackpot villains matches up against Jack Nicholson’s Joker or Danny DeVito’s Penguin in Tim Burton’s vastly superior classic Batman films. My second complaint has to do with clichés, especially comic book clichés, where the bad guys, dumbfounded by their new, virtually invisible enemy, mutter illiterate lines like “where are you” and “who the hell was that guy” before the hero’s obvious, “I’m Batman”. I know we don’t need Shakespeare here, but a little originality or humor could go a long way. Finally, my biggest problem with the film, outside of scatterbrained explanations of Wayne Enterprises and why exactly Bruce’s dad had a Batmobile, rubber suit, and a cache of weapons in his building, guarded by Morgan Freeman, is the two lead actors, Christian Bale as Wayne, and Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes, a textbook second banana comic book female who harbors a powerful job (D.A.) and a powerful crush on the lead. Holmes may have Tom Cruise flipping out, buying expensive diamonds and jumping on couches, but she’s pretty bland here, relegated to looking pretty, uttering philosophic pep-speak (“It’s not who you are underneath,” she says to Bruce, “it’s what you do that defines you.”), and threatening to expose Gotham’s corruption, not unlike Vicki Vale of yesteryear. The character takes up too much space as is, but is woefully underwritten, one of those characters that pops up for a Big Moment, and fades into the background until their next plot development is necessary. As for Bale, I have a friend who praised his performance because he’s the first actor to use a different, lower voice while in the suit, and indeed, this is true, but anybody can lower his voice an octave in the Batsuit, but still come off stiff and moody as the civilian Wayne. He possesses none of the charm of Michael Keaton in the Wayne role, and the structured yet unbalanced approach to Batman’s evolution (he trains, he finds a cave, he finds his toys, he gets hurt, he masters it all) hampers the easy heroics of such a figure. I wanted to like “Batman Begins”, I really did, because this has been a bad movie year, and the summer blockbusters are supposed to make it better, especially a rejuvenated version of an aging classic, but instead we’ve got a film that looks great, but is tedious and uneven, despite the general critical consensus that it’s a stellar entry into the comic book genre. It’s not, and I’m sorry it has to end this way, but the alliteration was inevitable; Batman begins, Batman becomes, and Batman bores. “Batman Begins” is playing at the Movie-Plex 59. by Adam Suraf
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