The first negative review of Batman Begins, and its from a Canadian critic:
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Batman Begins **½
This Batman doesn't fly
By LIAM LACEY
Tuesday, June 14, 2005 Updated at 2:26 AM EDT
From Tuesday's Globe
Batman Begins
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
Starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Katie Holmes and Liam Neeson
Classification: PG
Rating: **½
Oh, what will it take to make Batman fly again? The Warner Bros. Batman movie franchise started with an intoxicating, mad, gothic bang with Tim Burton's Batman (1989) and then went downhill with three subsequent movies, including Burton's Batman Returns and two bloated, campy Joel Schumacher sequels (Batman Forever, Batman and Robin).
Now, eight years after the superhero's last appearance, the franchise has been handed to 34-year-old Christopher Nolan to create a prequel.
The film is obviously intended to hark back to Burton's first film to emphasize the Caped Crusader's shadowy beginnings, before he donned the pointy ears and the winged decal on his chest.
Nolan is a director known more for intellect than action, which caused some stir of excitement when it was first announced he had signed on for the Batman Begins project. Fans of Nolan's earlier films know he likes protagonists whose heroism consists of overcompensation for psychological impairment. In Nolan's breakthrough film, Memento, Guy Pierce starred as an amnesiac trying to discover his past; his English-language remake of Insomnia featured Al Pacino as an insomniac racing against exhaustion to stop a serial killer. This time, Nolan has cast Christian Bale as a chiropteraphobiac, someone with an irrational fear of bats.
After the initial swirl of batwings during the opening credits, the movie starts with the traumatizing childhood moment: A little Bruce Wayne is chasing a little girl, Rachel (soon to grow up into Katie Holmes) when little Bruce falls down a carelessly uncovered hidden well and finds himself swarmed by the winged rodents.
Fans of the comics and the first movie may remember that young Bruce already had a sizable childhood trauma to contend with: He witnessed his parents gunned-down. Now that episode has batty associations as well: Young Bruce was spooked during a production of Die Fledermaus and asked his parents to leave the opera, when they were subsequently shot, thus causing young Bruce to associate his bat fear with his parents' death.
Cut, not to a psychiatrist's couch, but to a central Asian prison, where a now-grown Bruce (Christian Bale) has ended up after dropping out of Princeton and going out in the world to understand the nature of the criminal mind. One typical morning, he beats up a half-dozen thugs and is sent back to his cell where a mysterious stranger called Ducard (Liam Neeson in a wispy white beard) appears unto him and whisks him away to a Himalayan camp, part monastery, part ninja-terrorist training centre.
Ducard is sort of a Jedi Knight (like Neeson's role in Star Wars: Episode 1), only this time it's by way of Al-Qaeda. He belongs to a secret moralistic organization of killjoy ninjas called The League of Shadows that takes credit for every decadence-purging historical event from the sack of Rome to the Great Plague. He also evokes Uma Thurman's mentor in the Kill Bill movies, as he beats the stuffing out of young Bruce Wayne to help build his character.
"To conquer fear you must become fear," he advises, which is the audience's first glimmer of hope in the movie's 40 minutes that we might actually get to see Bruce Wayne dress up as a bat.
Sure enough, Bruce soon parts ways, not amicably, with his mentor and heads back to Gotham, to Alfred the Butler (Michael Caine) and to Rachel the childhood sweetheart who is now an assistant district attorney (Holmes). He discovers that Wayne Enterprises, the source of his multibillion-dollar fortune, is now in the hands of a shady board chairman (Rutger Hauer).
Gotham is a monumental dump, in much the same state of rubbled confusion it was in Tim Burton's Batman 17 years ago. This feels outdated. Gotham, we know, is a stand-in for New York, and the idea of New York as a ruined city, from Escape from New York (1981) to Batman (1989), is an anachronism. It has little to do with the shopping-mall sterility of today's Times Square. More disappointing, Nolan never makes Gotham dangerous and exciting, just vast and glum.
To get to business and to start crime fighting, Bruce gets a job back at the family company and enlists the help of Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), a Wayne Enterprises scientist who provides military prototype equipment that can easily be modified as Batman costumes and Batmobiles. Not too long after, he finds Gotham's last honest cop (Gary Oldman, disguised to the point of invisibility as usual) to assist him in his fight against way too many villains.
There's the Italian mobster running the town, called Falcone (played by Tom Wilkinson). Trolling through back issues of the comic book, the writers found the villain called Scarecrow, an effete psychiatrist called Dr. Jonathan Crane (a snidely simpering Cillian Murphy) who puts a burlap bag over his head and sprays a powder in people's faces which causes them to hallucinate their worst fears.
But neither of these small-time evil-doers are the real enemy: The conflict goes apocalyptic when we learn that, somewhere out in the ocean, terrorists have absconded with the Wayne Enterprises device that can cause the panic powder to be spread everywhere and bring Gotham to its end. All of this is a competently acted and directed demonstration of paint-by-numbers, blockbuster movie-making, but who really gives a bat's ass?
All of the story is so absurdly humourless that it is dramatically inert, as if Nolan had decided the only way to make the Batman character more substantial was to put weights on his wings. Genuine opportunities to explore a political context — the obvious post-Sept. 11 references to white powder, terrorist attacks and the political manipulation of fear — are wasted. Stylistically, the movie is similarly disappointing. Where are the dizzying perspective shots that made the first Spider-Man movie so much fun?
Here, the action sequences feel like generic studio product, frantically and confusingly edited, and the lengthy Batmobile chase scene feels like a good opportunity to take the kids to the bat-room.
There's something piquant in casting Christian Bale as the split personality Bruce Wayne. The similarity between his role as the playboy-by-day, avenger-by-night and his turn as Patrick Bateman, stockbroker-by-day, serial-killer-by-night, in Mary Harron's American Psycho is provocative, even if unintentional. Unfortunately, Bale's Bruce Wayne doesn't seem crazy, just wooden.
His romantic encounters with Katie Holmes are stilted. He's worse when he's in the Batman costume, when he juts out his chin and alters his voice to sound as though he has a nasty three-pack-a-day habit. Now, that would be something to suggest a smouldering dark side. Are we ready for: Batman: Episode 2: The Smoker Vs. The Joker?
This Batman doesn't fly
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Batman Begins **½
This Batman doesn't fly
By LIAM LACEY
Tuesday, June 14, 2005 Updated at 2:26 AM EDT
From Tuesday's Globe
Batman Begins
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
Starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Katie Holmes and Liam Neeson
Classification: PG
Rating: **½
Oh, what will it take to make Batman fly again? The Warner Bros. Batman movie franchise started with an intoxicating, mad, gothic bang with Tim Burton's Batman (1989) and then went downhill with three subsequent movies, including Burton's Batman Returns and two bloated, campy Joel Schumacher sequels (Batman Forever, Batman and Robin).
Now, eight years after the superhero's last appearance, the franchise has been handed to 34-year-old Christopher Nolan to create a prequel.
The film is obviously intended to hark back to Burton's first film to emphasize the Caped Crusader's shadowy beginnings, before he donned the pointy ears and the winged decal on his chest.
Nolan is a director known more for intellect than action, which caused some stir of excitement when it was first announced he had signed on for the Batman Begins project. Fans of Nolan's earlier films know he likes protagonists whose heroism consists of overcompensation for psychological impairment. In Nolan's breakthrough film, Memento, Guy Pierce starred as an amnesiac trying to discover his past; his English-language remake of Insomnia featured Al Pacino as an insomniac racing against exhaustion to stop a serial killer. This time, Nolan has cast Christian Bale as a chiropteraphobiac, someone with an irrational fear of bats.
After the initial swirl of batwings during the opening credits, the movie starts with the traumatizing childhood moment: A little Bruce Wayne is chasing a little girl, Rachel (soon to grow up into Katie Holmes) when little Bruce falls down a carelessly uncovered hidden well and finds himself swarmed by the winged rodents.
Fans of the comics and the first movie may remember that young Bruce already had a sizable childhood trauma to contend with: He witnessed his parents gunned-down. Now that episode has batty associations as well: Young Bruce was spooked during a production of Die Fledermaus and asked his parents to leave the opera, when they were subsequently shot, thus causing young Bruce to associate his bat fear with his parents' death.
Cut, not to a psychiatrist's couch, but to a central Asian prison, where a now-grown Bruce (Christian Bale) has ended up after dropping out of Princeton and going out in the world to understand the nature of the criminal mind. One typical morning, he beats up a half-dozen thugs and is sent back to his cell where a mysterious stranger called Ducard (Liam Neeson in a wispy white beard) appears unto him and whisks him away to a Himalayan camp, part monastery, part ninja-terrorist training centre.
Ducard is sort of a Jedi Knight (like Neeson's role in Star Wars: Episode 1), only this time it's by way of Al-Qaeda. He belongs to a secret moralistic organization of killjoy ninjas called The League of Shadows that takes credit for every decadence-purging historical event from the sack of Rome to the Great Plague. He also evokes Uma Thurman's mentor in the Kill Bill movies, as he beats the stuffing out of young Bruce Wayne to help build his character.
"To conquer fear you must become fear," he advises, which is the audience's first glimmer of hope in the movie's 40 minutes that we might actually get to see Bruce Wayne dress up as a bat.
Sure enough, Bruce soon parts ways, not amicably, with his mentor and heads back to Gotham, to Alfred the Butler (Michael Caine) and to Rachel the childhood sweetheart who is now an assistant district attorney (Holmes). He discovers that Wayne Enterprises, the source of his multibillion-dollar fortune, is now in the hands of a shady board chairman (Rutger Hauer).
Gotham is a monumental dump, in much the same state of rubbled confusion it was in Tim Burton's Batman 17 years ago. This feels outdated. Gotham, we know, is a stand-in for New York, and the idea of New York as a ruined city, from Escape from New York (1981) to Batman (1989), is an anachronism. It has little to do with the shopping-mall sterility of today's Times Square. More disappointing, Nolan never makes Gotham dangerous and exciting, just vast and glum.
To get to business and to start crime fighting, Bruce gets a job back at the family company and enlists the help of Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), a Wayne Enterprises scientist who provides military prototype equipment that can easily be modified as Batman costumes and Batmobiles. Not too long after, he finds Gotham's last honest cop (Gary Oldman, disguised to the point of invisibility as usual) to assist him in his fight against way too many villains.
There's the Italian mobster running the town, called Falcone (played by Tom Wilkinson). Trolling through back issues of the comic book, the writers found the villain called Scarecrow, an effete psychiatrist called Dr. Jonathan Crane (a snidely simpering Cillian Murphy) who puts a burlap bag over his head and sprays a powder in people's faces which causes them to hallucinate their worst fears.
But neither of these small-time evil-doers are the real enemy: The conflict goes apocalyptic when we learn that, somewhere out in the ocean, terrorists have absconded with the Wayne Enterprises device that can cause the panic powder to be spread everywhere and bring Gotham to its end. All of this is a competently acted and directed demonstration of paint-by-numbers, blockbuster movie-making, but who really gives a bat's ass?
All of the story is so absurdly humourless that it is dramatically inert, as if Nolan had decided the only way to make the Batman character more substantial was to put weights on his wings. Genuine opportunities to explore a political context — the obvious post-Sept. 11 references to white powder, terrorist attacks and the political manipulation of fear — are wasted. Stylistically, the movie is similarly disappointing. Where are the dizzying perspective shots that made the first Spider-Man movie so much fun?
Here, the action sequences feel like generic studio product, frantically and confusingly edited, and the lengthy Batmobile chase scene feels like a good opportunity to take the kids to the bat-room.
There's something piquant in casting Christian Bale as the split personality Bruce Wayne. The similarity between his role as the playboy-by-day, avenger-by-night and his turn as Patrick Bateman, stockbroker-by-day, serial-killer-by-night, in Mary Harron's American Psycho is provocative, even if unintentional. Unfortunately, Bale's Bruce Wayne doesn't seem crazy, just wooden.
His romantic encounters with Katie Holmes are stilted. He's worse when he's in the Batman costume, when he juts out his chin and alters his voice to sound as though he has a nasty three-pack-a-day habit. Now, that would be something to suggest a smouldering dark side. Are we ready for: Batman: Episode 2: The Smoker Vs. The Joker?
This Batman doesn't fly
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