Friday, June 24, 2005
Last night I saw Batman Begins at the AMC Cantera 30 with Rick and Rob. I came away impressed, and very pleased about the prospect of more Batman movies with this same team onboard.
Let me state at the outset that I am an inveterate Christian Bale fan. I actually saw Empire of the Sun as a youngster, and I remember liking him even then, which doesn't make much sense but is quite convenient for the purposes of this review. Then I saw American Psycho in college, and honestly it's got some of the sickest, funniest humor I've ever seen in a movie, largely thanks to Bale's performance. I have a very odd sense of humor, so take that for what it's worth. Also I wish I had Mr. Bale's physique, which (sort of) brings me back to my point that I think his Batman is pretty easily the best portrayal I've seen, either on TV or on film. Count me among those who loves the old Adam West show, and even among those who quite liked Michael Keaton, at least in the first Tim Burton film. But I think we can all agree that believability was not among the attributes they brought to the character of Bruce Wayne, and although it's a dangerous thing to desire believability in a superhero flick, it was precisely this characteristic that really allowed me to embrace Bale's Batman more readily than any of his predecessors'. His "millionaire playboy" experience from Pyscho held him in good stead, especially in a funny scene where he's forced to break up his own birthday party. But he also brought his trademark abs and guns to the role, and his readily acceptable combo of balls and brawn made the experience of suspending my disbelief re: the Caped Crusader easier and, really, more enjoyable than ever before.
This is important because the movie starts out somewhere in Asia, involves Wayne's training by a cadre of elite ninjas known as the League of Shadows(?), headed up by Liam Neeson (??), who've hatched an appropriately shadowy plot to bring down Gotham city. Here it seems like a good place to mention that Christopher Nolan directed this movie, and co-wrote, the same C. Nolan in charge of both Memento (a personal fave) and Insomnia, which was probably the best thing Al Pacino's been involved in since the early 80s. In Nolan's capable hands, even the gobbledygook above is pretty enjoyable, and does a solid job of something none of the other Batman movies even attempted to do--explaining just how the hell Bruce Wayne became, y'know, capable of scaling buildings, taking thugs on six-on-one, and disappearing without a whisper. It's a bit slow, but the time they take to lay this stuff out makes Wayne's return to Gotham more satisfying for knowing and believing that one man can take on a whole city and somehow come out on top.
Of course that's not really right--there are other people in the movie besides Bale and Neeson, and actually the cast is pretty star-studded: trusty butler Alfred is played to the hilt by Michael Cane (of whom I've never been a huge fan, but here he's Oscar-worthy, and I'm not really joking), token love interest/childhood buddy/Asst. D.A. is Katie Holmes, Batman’s personal armorer/fixer is Morgan Freeman (enjoyable as always), the future commissioner Gordon is Gary Oldman, Rutger Hauer plays the corrupt president of Wayne Enterprises, and Cillian Murphy takes an extremely effective turn as the Scarecrow.
A word here about Cillian Murphy: he could go on playing bad guys the rest of his career and probably make me quite happy by doing so. He brought excellent touch to the Scarecrow, here played as a psychotic psychiatrist who induces terrifying hallucinations in both patients and enemies using a weaponized psychotropic aerosol. There’s something, I dunno, satisfyingly creepy about him in this movie, something ineffably unsettling. Which is, I think, just what he’s going for, right up until we see our first on-screen hallucination from the patient’s POV, which is concretely unsettling and very well done.
In fact, there are quite a bit more hallucination-POV shots than I was expecting in this movie, but they were all surprisingly good, especially a scene where our hero turns the tables and doles out a little therapy on the good doctor, who’s been unexpectedly dosed with his own drug. The fact is that much of the plot revolves around this drug and its potential use against the citizens of Gotham, and another element of the movie I found enjoyable and believable was that although he came up with a superhero movie-plot-demanded antidote, Batman was unable to dispense this antidote in mass quantities right away. Movies like this are, for me, a balance between the contrived and the realistic, and it should be obvious after almost 1000 words that I thought this balance was steady. For instance, it looks pretty damn hard for Batman to climb up the side of a building in this film. I like that. He’s also capable of driving a tank across the top of a church and not falling through, though, which I also like. Movies like this are supposed to have fantastic moments, but they need to be measured against characters saying intelligent things and acting in consistent ways. Mission accomplished.
Speaking of saying intelligent things, the script is actually pretty funny, and it has the distinction of being delivered through some very solid actors, as I’ve mentioned. Nolan and his co-writer have a good grasp of both spectacle and human touch, something that couldn’t be boasted of any previous Batman script. Even the standard cheesy superhero moments are largely done in fresh or even surprising ways, particularly in one sequence near the end of the film involving the commissioner and the Batmobile. Above all I’m simply pleased to be delivered a good Batman movie that also introduces some more rarely-seen storytelling concepts into the genre: namely character and plot development, measured realism, and Morgan Freeman. Katie Holmes, while regrettably fully-clothed throughout, also lends—as always—a little something extra to the proceedings. I think I’ll go see it again.
Let me state at the outset that I am an inveterate Christian Bale fan. I actually saw Empire of the Sun as a youngster, and I remember liking him even then, which doesn't make much sense but is quite convenient for the purposes of this review. Then I saw American Psycho in college, and honestly it's got some of the sickest, funniest humor I've ever seen in a movie, largely thanks to Bale's performance. I have a very odd sense of humor, so take that for what it's worth. Also I wish I had Mr. Bale's physique, which (sort of) brings me back to my point that I think his Batman is pretty easily the best portrayal I've seen, either on TV or on film. Count me among those who loves the old Adam West show, and even among those who quite liked Michael Keaton, at least in the first Tim Burton film. But I think we can all agree that believability was not among the attributes they brought to the character of Bruce Wayne, and although it's a dangerous thing to desire believability in a superhero flick, it was precisely this characteristic that really allowed me to embrace Bale's Batman more readily than any of his predecessors'. His "millionaire playboy" experience from Pyscho held him in good stead, especially in a funny scene where he's forced to break up his own birthday party. But he also brought his trademark abs and guns to the role, and his readily acceptable combo of balls and brawn made the experience of suspending my disbelief re: the Caped Crusader easier and, really, more enjoyable than ever before.
This is important because the movie starts out somewhere in Asia, involves Wayne's training by a cadre of elite ninjas known as the League of Shadows(?), headed up by Liam Neeson (??), who've hatched an appropriately shadowy plot to bring down Gotham city. Here it seems like a good place to mention that Christopher Nolan directed this movie, and co-wrote, the same C. Nolan in charge of both Memento (a personal fave) and Insomnia, which was probably the best thing Al Pacino's been involved in since the early 80s. In Nolan's capable hands, even the gobbledygook above is pretty enjoyable, and does a solid job of something none of the other Batman movies even attempted to do--explaining just how the hell Bruce Wayne became, y'know, capable of scaling buildings, taking thugs on six-on-one, and disappearing without a whisper. It's a bit slow, but the time they take to lay this stuff out makes Wayne's return to Gotham more satisfying for knowing and believing that one man can take on a whole city and somehow come out on top.
Of course that's not really right--there are other people in the movie besides Bale and Neeson, and actually the cast is pretty star-studded: trusty butler Alfred is played to the hilt by Michael Cane (of whom I've never been a huge fan, but here he's Oscar-worthy, and I'm not really joking), token love interest/childhood buddy/Asst. D.A. is Katie Holmes, Batman’s personal armorer/fixer is Morgan Freeman (enjoyable as always), the future commissioner Gordon is Gary Oldman, Rutger Hauer plays the corrupt president of Wayne Enterprises, and Cillian Murphy takes an extremely effective turn as the Scarecrow.
A word here about Cillian Murphy: he could go on playing bad guys the rest of his career and probably make me quite happy by doing so. He brought excellent touch to the Scarecrow, here played as a psychotic psychiatrist who induces terrifying hallucinations in both patients and enemies using a weaponized psychotropic aerosol. There’s something, I dunno, satisfyingly creepy about him in this movie, something ineffably unsettling. Which is, I think, just what he’s going for, right up until we see our first on-screen hallucination from the patient’s POV, which is concretely unsettling and very well done.
In fact, there are quite a bit more hallucination-POV shots than I was expecting in this movie, but they were all surprisingly good, especially a scene where our hero turns the tables and doles out a little therapy on the good doctor, who’s been unexpectedly dosed with his own drug. The fact is that much of the plot revolves around this drug and its potential use against the citizens of Gotham, and another element of the movie I found enjoyable and believable was that although he came up with a superhero movie-plot-demanded antidote, Batman was unable to dispense this antidote in mass quantities right away. Movies like this are, for me, a balance between the contrived and the realistic, and it should be obvious after almost 1000 words that I thought this balance was steady. For instance, it looks pretty damn hard for Batman to climb up the side of a building in this film. I like that. He’s also capable of driving a tank across the top of a church and not falling through, though, which I also like. Movies like this are supposed to have fantastic moments, but they need to be measured against characters saying intelligent things and acting in consistent ways. Mission accomplished.
Speaking of saying intelligent things, the script is actually pretty funny, and it has the distinction of being delivered through some very solid actors, as I’ve mentioned. Nolan and his co-writer have a good grasp of both spectacle and human touch, something that couldn’t be boasted of any previous Batman script. Even the standard cheesy superhero moments are largely done in fresh or even surprising ways, particularly in one sequence near the end of the film involving the commissioner and the Batmobile. Above all I’m simply pleased to be delivered a good Batman movie that also introduces some more rarely-seen storytelling concepts into the genre: namely character and plot development, measured realism, and Morgan Freeman. Katie Holmes, while regrettably fully-clothed throughout, also lends—as always—a little something extra to the proceedings. I think I’ll go see it again.
