Batman Begins

In 1997, Hollywood created a monster. Some of the highest paid actors in the scene joined together in what should have been the hit of the summer. Instead, it was excremental garbage - overblown, sanitised tripe of the highest and most expensive order. Schumacher's would-be epic was a cinematic joke, and it appeared to not only kill the license, but comic book movies in general: as Superman crumbled and The Fantastic Four was deferred again and again, the superhero adaptation seemed to be something that the big shots weren't willing to touch, at least not with any serious money. It took Bryan Singer to revive things with X-Men: an intelligent, full-blooded piece that stuck more or less to the books but which seemed to be as much about character development as it was about action - perhaps more so.

It's appropriate, and perhaps even ironic, that the resurrected Batman should pay tribute to Singer's opening X-Men picture to the extent that it does. The film opens not, as you might expect, in the choking nightscape of Gotham city, but rather in a Tibetan prison. It's an interesting and unexpected use of location that calls to mind Kevin Reynolds' 1991 retelling of Robin Hood, which placed its opening sequence not in the greenery of Sherwood forest but in the dankness of a Jerusalem jail cell. It's in the middle of this prison that we find Bruce Wayne, as portrayed by Christian Bale - who is there, apparently, to find himself. It's not the sort of opening you expect - or if it was, you wouldn't expect to find your principal character there, and a bearded, scruffy Bruce Wayne is the first of many unusual but welcome surprises.

Much like Ang Lee's Hulk, the first hour of Batman Begins is mainly build-up: a personal journey through childhood trauma, post-adolescent flashback and ice rink swordplay. Under the watchful guidance of Liam Neeson's bearded mentor - Qui-Gon Jinn, but a little less impulsive - Wayne channels his anger, fear and aggression in the ultimate search for enlightenment, before returning to his forsaken Gotham City, which it seems is in desperate need of a little salvation. There Wayne finds his business empire not what it once was, crime rampant, and the mob in control. Something needs to be done - cometh the hour, cometh the man….

If the first hour is occasionally slow, the second hour is quintessential comic book - billowy capes, rooftop battles, and lots of sudden disappearing without trace. And it's only during the second or third set piece that you realise that the whole story of Bruce Wayne's inner torment lends the film a deep emotional resonance: we genuinely feel for him, even though it's nigh on impossible to empathise, and the fact that the path he takes to become Batman is so fraught with peril brings even more dramatic emphasis to proceedings. His desire to take revenge and strike out at the criminal underworld is superceded only by our desire to see him reach his potential and become the caped crusader, and it's in the forging of this relationship between actor and audience that the film enjoys its greatest success.

Stylistically, this is where things really start to take off. Nowhere is this more apparent that in the fraught battle sequences, with Wally Pfister's cinematography playing a principal role, as the camera swoops and slashes round from character to character in dizzying routines that sometimes rely on two or three cuts a second. It could be (and has been) argued that this makes it difficult to figure out who's hitting whom, but this is probably intentional: Batman's very presence as a terrifying winged vigilante lends a sense of disorientation to the poor unfortunate that he's in the process of beating up, and if they don't know what's going on, why should we? Meanwhile, the Batmobile roars into action in the form of a large tank, complete with Sat Nav technology, charging across the concrete freeway to an affable (if unmemorable) score from Hans Zimmer, and roaring through New York-style financial districts and dingy back alleys. If this Gotham City lacks the stylistic industrialist chic of Tim Burton's vision, it makes up for it with a whole lot of panache.

Bale himself is good enough - lots of brooding looks coupled with shark like smiles when he's in millionaire playboy mode, and a rasping, snarling voice for the occasions when he wants to be seriously angry. Michael Caine provides decent support as Alfred the Butler, who could be cross-referenced in the Oxford English under loyalty. Caine brings his own brand of humour to the role, but never allows the cliched mannerisms for which he's commonly known to compromise the part - although when Batman emerges from the flames like a bat out of hell during one set piece, it's hard to resist the temptation to shout "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!". Bale and Caine are backed up by Gary Oldman's Sergeant Gordon, a younger version of Batman's closest police ally, and Morgan Freeman as inventor Lucius Fox, who gets a lot of the best lines. Katie Holmes proves that there's more to her than an embarrassing tabloid relationship with Tom Cruise, and Linus Roache, glimpsed in flashback, makes for a compassionate Thomas Wayne.

While the heroes are almost all present and correct, it's the villains who suffer a little: Cillian Murphy drips evil as Jonathan Crane, a creepy psychiatrist moonlighting as the sinister Scarecrow, but his character remains drastically unexplored. Tom Wilkinson's mob boss is competent enough, as is Rutger Hauer's smarmy businessman, but the main problem is that they all seem to be fighting for screen time - there are apparent connections between many of the villains, but the web is so intricate that it's occasionally difficult to know who's working for whom, and what they want, leaving you anxious for the six-foot bat to find a nice lay person that he can use as a soundboard for some much-needed exposition. What's more, the second half of the film seems a little rushed at times: characters don't always take the paths you'd expect them to take, and there are moments of vague dissatisfaction, as if things are left slightly unfinished.

But maybe that's the point. Crime, after all, is a never-ending battle, and an open-ended (if nonetheless satisfactory) conclusion is testament to the fact that we're witnessing the birth of a hero. It's the first act of a sequence of events that circulates on the continuous loop of comic book writing, as battles are won and lost and then started again a while later - a key theme that runs through much of Chris Nolan's work. If Memento made Nolan a household name, Batman Begins is destined to make him a star - the man who (with a little help from his friends) successfully brought back one of the most interesting comic book characters in history, and updated a true hero without losing sight of the original vision. While it's easy to imagine a suited executive standing at the back of the studio with arms folded and a permanent scowl, serving as a reminder of how much this thing is costing them, the director nonetheless manages to walk away with his integrity intact - leaving behind a dazzling, intelligent spectacle that's only the first part of what is certain to be an exciting series. And any film that can get a decent performance out of Gary Oldman has got to be worth anybody's money.

(Friday, 17th June 2005)