Review______________
I was on my way out the door last night, another day of work behind me and another night of sitting around, watching the master works of Robert Z'Dar and seeing how many Cheetos™ I can shove up my nose before I can be considered legally dead awaiting me at home. Fortunately, fate (in this case, my boss) intervened with a last minute invite to see a special, "invitation only" screening of Batman Begins at the glory that is known as an IMAX theater. Seems the previous ticket holder fell ill and I was next on the list of potential viewers!... well, third on the list, but I was the one who ended up going, so I win. :-P
Yes, I've resorted to emoticons.
Though I know a good 7 or 8 people who would've been loading their unmentionables with one unsanitary substance or another if in my position, the TV spots that have been kicking me in the oculars for the last couple weeks have been dampening my one time burning campfire of fanboy anticipation and it's been a looming depression shared by my fellow dwellers of the four color realm. Sometimes the advertising firms for these movies should try getting feedback from the audiences they're targeting before they blow the studios' cash on crap.
Loitering on the topic of advertising for just a little longer, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce everyone to the "Big Ass Poster of Doom" theory my Evil Dead Bride and I share. Living in New York, we're subjected to more paper advertising than probably 99% of the rest of the country. On the sides of buses, on giant posters in the subway stations, even on that small space on the tops of cabs. On the sides of phone booths, on the little shelters at the bus stops, in the windows of stores and restaurants, on the fences of parking lots and construction sites, on those temporary safety constructs they set up in the sidewalk when there's work being done on a building. Oh yeah, and lest we forget, plastered on the sides of the biggest fucking buildings they can find. I'll never be able to repair the mental damage caused by seeing a King Kong sized Will Smith standing alongside Madison Square Garden in the darkened weeks leading up to I, Robot. Anyway, our theory basically stands that if you can find five or more ads for the same movie within two blocks of each other, the producers of the movie are so unsure about their final product that, instead of going back and fixing it, they'll just sink all that money into 'roid raging the ad campaign in the hopes that they'll be able to crush your free will enough to at least make back the money they spent on the movie in the opening weekend. Or, even simpler (and requiring less counting...), if you can find one ad for the movie in which the lead actor could look Godzilla in the eye, you're in for a good 90 minutes of the worst kind of suck.
Just to let everybody know the point of this tirade, this theory started to stalk my hopes before the TV spots even had their chance to overwhelm me when I saw the biggest godz damning excuse for a movie advert ever: Batman Begins across the entire face of a building on 6th Ave around 23rd St in Manhattan featuring a Christian Bale Batman of whom I might make up the equivalent of one of his toes... one of his smaller toes... Hell, maybe even just a toenail.
Based on the "Big Ass Poster of Doom" theory, this didn't look good. In fact, I think it was my complete lack of faith and excitement in seeing the actual movie that helped me walk out of that IMAX last night with at least a minor sense of satisfaction that I hadn't wasted 2+ hours of my life, unlike so many other cinematic suppositories.
Then again, the factors that I saw it for free and on a crystal clear screen of the "friggin' huge" persuasion may have also helped dampen my disappointment receptors. What can I say, sometimes I get a little biased on things like that...
Okay, on with the story. Note, with this being a special case and all (since the movie won't even hit wide release till next week), I'm doing a one-time-only "Spoilers Free" version of the review. If I think something happens that has an impact on the story (like a certain "plot twist"), it will be replaced by a big red line of text reading "SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!" Clicking on this will uncover the spoiler in all its ruining glory... or, if you're web browser is crappy and can't handle the Javascript, then I guess you won't have to worry about the spoilers either way. For these people, if you're desperate to see what these spoilers are, e-mail me at TOMBOFANUBIS@YAHOO.COM and let me know. I'll e-mail you the spoilers and we can all rest comfortably in our beds at night, knowing that we've made the world a better place... for ourselves.
Though the first third-or-so of the movie relies on jumping back and forth between the current time and various pasts, I'm gonna cut through that and go the old boring "straight through" route. One day, as spoiled rich kid Bruce Wayne and his friend Rachel Dawes (daughter to Bruce's maid) are chasing each other around the Wayne estate in dispute over who has property rights to an arrow head the two discovered, the young master manages to fall through a boarded up well that connects to a large cave. After hitting the bottom he's overwhelmed by a flurry of bats that swarm him in their flight out of the well... undeterred by the fact that it's daytime. Bruce lies there, curled into a ball of terror until his daddy, Dr. Thomas Wayne, rappels down into the well to return his son to the light, uttering a phrase of Uncle Ben (Spider-Man's uncle, not the rice box guy) inspiration that will be repeated through out the movie until you can't take it anymore: "Why do we fall down? So we can pick ourselves back up". Not exactly "With great power comes great responsibility", but you get the idea.
Following this junior spelunking expedition, Bruce has grown a crippling fear of flying rats. Dad repeatedly assures the lad that there's nothing to be afraid of and the boy and his parents make a trip into Gotham City... with all of its shiny buildings and its network of monorails. Did they learn nothing from the tragedies of Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook?! Fools!
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
The Waynes head into Gotham to see an opera, as opposed to
The Mark of Zorro, which was the movie the trio had seen in Batman's original origin. During the show, Bruce is terrified by one of the actors, who hangs by a rope in a black bat demon type costume. This leads mommy and daddy to leave for Bruce's sake. We all know what's going to happen next, making this opera scene as an excuse for Bruce to blame his whimpering little fears on the death of his parents.
Instead of leaving out of the front of the building, dumb-ass daddy leads his wife and young son out into a dark, dank, ominous alley. It's in this alley where they're accosted by a down-on-his-luck hood with a gun. Tommy, being the generous man he is, hands over his wallet with no resistance in an effort to avoid trouble. But, when the guy points his pistol at lovely Martha, Dr. Wayne puts himself between the gun and his wife, causing the derelict to lose his cool and shoot the bajillionaire... kind of ironic considering the guy's name is Joe Chill.
Martha gets gunned down too and little Bruce is left alone with his dying parents and a whole holocaust of psychological damage. Before he dies though, the father's last words to his son are "don't be afraid". Not "I love you" or "make me proud" or "call a damn ambulance", but "don't be afraid"... wow, I can't help but think there's supposed to be this whole "fear" theme going on here. In fact, I'd say you hear the word more here than you heard the word "fuck" in The Blair Witch Project.
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
At the police station following the attack, little Brucie is comforted by a beat cop named Jim Gordon... oh man, we're really laying it on thick here guys.
After all is said and done the fuzz catch Chill, he goes to prison and we jump ahead 14 years. Bruce (now played by Christian Bale) has gone away to Princeton, returning to Gotham on the eve of Chill's release hearing. Seems that ol' Joe was bunkin' with a guy named Carmine Falcone and picked up a lot of useful info in that time. In exchange for his promised testimony against Falcone, he's released. College boy Bruce attends the hearing and brings his little brother Smith & Wesson with him, fully intending to get revenge for his long corpsed-up parents.
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
Before he can walk up to Chill in a crowd of reporters and paint the courthouse walls a shade of Joe Grey (as in "matter"), a shot rings out from elsewhere and Chill collapses, dead on impact. Bruce is denied his revenge. Boo-hoo.
After the incident Bruce goes for a ride with his pal Rachel, now Gotham's resident assistant D.A., and she's gives him a little eye-opening session. Being a champion of the people and all that crap, she goes into a gut churning speech about how guys like Joe Chill aren't criminals. No, guys like Joe are victims of society. When Gotham went into a depression, people like Chill couldn't get by without resorting to crime. Instead, Rach blames the kingpin types like Carmine Falcone, who has half the city's law makers and enforcers sleeping snugly in his wallet, wrapped in the warm embrace of blood money, resting their heads on narcotics, gambling and prostitution. This of course hits home with angry young Bruce and he tries to confront Falcone. Admiring the kid's spunk, Carmine lets the kid go with little more than a couple bruises and a tummy ache courtesy of his hired goons ("I prefer the hands-on touch you only get with hired goons"). This makes it official for Bruce Wayne: it's time to go figure out how to fight crime and beat up six guys at once so he can come back to Gotham and clean up the mean streets that guys like his dad tried to pave with gold.
In order to combat the criminal element, Bruce decides he must first lower himself to their level. Giving up the creature comforts of the heir life, he associates with the downtrodden and desperate unwashed in China/Taiwan/Hong Kong, finding out how they tick. He's caught by local authorities for his part in hijacking a truck (filled with Wayne Industries technology... har har) and winds up in a Chinese/Taiwanese/Hong Kong prison, where he spends his mornings beating the shit out of thugs and feeding on the finest prison dining this side of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Mmm Mmm, that's good gruel! When he's returned to his cell (for the safety of the other prisoners mind you), he finds one more uppity European guy in there than he'd awakened to. Calling himself Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), the guy claims he can bring Bruce the guidance he needs, setting him on the path to filling the gaping void left by his parents' demise. Upon his release, Bruce is instructed to find a rare blue flower in the surrounding mountains and bring it with him to the top of the highest summit. Yeah, Henri works for a special "members only" club and them pretty blue flowers are the secret handshake.
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
Bruce's new frat is called the Brotherhood of Shadow. They're a secret organization of ninjas whose goal is to wipeout crime in the world by dealing with ne'er-do-wells via swift and permanent justice using the methods of deception, fear and Ginsu™. The Brotherhood is run by a Chinese/Taiwanese/Hong Kongian dude (Ken Wantanabe) named Ra's Al Ghul... which is funny, since Ra's is supposed to be European... and is supposed to have a beard more resembling that of Ducard than of, well, this guy. Make a note of this.
As with any hero story, Bruce's mastery of "wax on, wax off" leads to his surpassing of sensei Ducard and the conquering of his fears (there's that damn 'f' word again...), leading to his final exam for acceptance into the Brotherhood. But, when they demand that he execute a farmer who killed people trying to steal his land from him, Wayne replies with a big "negative" on the killing subject. This leads to conflict of the physical kind with his new cohorts and a flying branding iron sets off 12 tons of unfortunately placed gun powder, bringing the Delta Delta Die frat house down around their ears in the form of flaming planks. Bruce saves an unconscious Henri from taking a permanent nose dive off the side of a cliff and drops his sole survivor buddy off at a peasant hut further down the mountain. All I can say is DAMN that Bruce Wayne's got strong hands! He must have ice picks for fingers or something...
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
Mr. "Al Ghul" dies in the fire, crushed under burning planks with some rather fatal looking blood streaming from his lips.
Immediately returning to Gotham to begin his war on crime following his seven year absence, the billionaire playboy and his pal/butler Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) start planning for the high-tech crusade on crime, including the beginning work on the Bat Cave and the construction of a few toys. Bruce, not interested in being trapped in the business end of his father's legacy, gets an inside job at Wayne Industries in their science and development wing. Here he makes friendly with the wing's head, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), who was placed in this defunct department to develop "non-lethal" forms of military hardware that'll never reach mass production... meaning the bosses put him there to keep him out of their hair. While here, Wayne picks up some bulletproof body armor, various grappling hooks and other gadgets, and tops it all off with a new set of wheels that's half all-terrain rocket car, half tank, and all, well, overkill. As for all of his old buddies in the big shitty known as GC, Rachel's still assistant D.A. and beat cop James Gordon has been promoted to Sergeant. These guys are two of the only "good cops" left in the corrupt bowels of Gotham. Sgt. Gordon is a good cop, but has been overwhelmed by the surrounding corruption to make much of a difference on his own. As for Rachel, she's forced to watch as day in and day out the thugs, goons and kneecap denters (one of which is comic book crazy Mr. Zsasz... because we all know that people with palindromes for names are inherently the right hands of Satan) of Carmine Falcone are freed on "temporary insanity" pleas, released into the "professional" custody of Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cilian Murphy), head of the Arkham Asylum. As you may have guessed, Crane is also under Falcone's green influence and likes to give fake psychological evaluations at court hearing so that nobody serves any real time.
I hear he also likes long walks on the beach, soft music and eating womens' faces by candlelight, but the jury's still out on that stuff.
To keep up the illusion that he's a carefree rich boy who likes spending his dead daddy's dough (and to put to rest the seven year rumors that he's been dead...), Bruce spends his nights doubling up on dates with Swedish models and pretending to get drunk and bad mouth his fellow rich folk. He spends his late nights, however, decked out in leather and grabbing men in dark alleys. Wonder if he frequents highway rest stops much.
Bats grabs Carmine Falcone and a lot of useful evidence at a major drug deal, getting the kingpin into police custody and passing the evidence on to Rachel for use in court. He threatens to expose some not-nice things about Dr. Crane and his mystery benefactor if he doesn't get him out of this whole fuck up, so Crane responds by donning a ragged scarecrow mask and poisoning the goomba with a toxic gas that instills crippling terror into anyone exposed to it. Falcone is left a babbling mass of tears and stained shorts and Crane's secrets are apparently safe for now. Carmine is ordered into the care of Arkham Asylum where Crane plans on using him, much like he's been using Falcone's goons, in his fear gas experiments. As for Batman, while he's scoping out the locale of a mysterious drug shipment Falcone was behind, who but the Scarecrow and some of his own hoods should stop by with the intention of burning down all the evidence linking them to the hideout. After an unhealthy dose of fear gas and brief role as the human torch (tap dancing into the path of another certain four color blockbuster-to-be for the 2005 summer season...), the hero manages to extinguish himself and call in Alfred for backup. Al gives him some bed rest and antitoxins...
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
... created by family friend Lucius Fox, who now officially knows the secret of Gotham's most eligible bachelor and it's more infamous masked man...
... and the playboy is good as new in no time... or two days, whichever comes first.
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
Back at Wayne Enterprises, it seems that a certain weapon of war has been hijacked from a recent boat shipment. The weapon is a microwave generator doohickey that's meant to immediately destroy an enemy's water supply in second by evaporating the Hell out of it. Who could have stolen this and why? Read on.
As for Rachel, when she finds out that Falcone's been moved to Arkham, she storms through the sanitarium's doors demanding to see Crane and waving a court order to have a psychological evaluator of her own choosing to double check Carmine's bill of health. She of course gets lead into the loony bin's basement, where Doc Crane reveals the workings of his fear gas...
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
... and his goons dumping the components of said fear toxin into the city's water supply.
Rachel gets an especially fatal dose of the gas, but is rescued in the proverbial nick of time (whoever this Nick guy is...) when Batman arrives and beats the tar out of Crane's goons. As for the doctor himself, Bat's blasts him in the face with a dose of his own spook spray, leading to a creepy hallucination sequence in which Crane sees Batman as a black, hulking demon brute that vomits tar. Freaky-deaky indeed. Meanwhile, the Gotham PD shows up, SWAT Team and all, hunting a bat but armed for bear.
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
Using a sonar device that looks like one of those egg killing roach traps that he keeps clipped under his boot, Bats summons up a veritable storm cloud of his winged namesake to provide a distraction. Readers of the modern classic Batman: Year One story will recognize this part.
In the confusion, Bats escapes the police blockade and gets Rachel to his male overcompensation mobile (A.K.A. the Bat-Tank-Mobile). A fun car chase ensues and Bats gets Rach back to the Bat Cave, where he injects her with the anti-toxin, gives her a few samples to pass on to Sgt. Gordon, then slips her a roofie and has Alfred take her home. At Wayne Manor, Bruce has to attend to a birthday party filled with his fake high-society friends in order to keep up his playboy illusion. Here he's told he simply must meet "a most interesting man" named... Ra's Al Ghul. It's safe to say that the shit hits the fan from this point on.
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
The Ra's attending the party isn't the Chinese/Taiwanese/Hong Kongian guy from earlier in the movie though, as we left that pawn bleeding from the pie hole and trapped under a burning plank. No, the true Ra's is revealed... to be Henri Ducard. See, told ya it didn't make sense to have some European guy with a Ra's beard NOT be Ra's Al Ghul! Then again, anyone who's ever read the comic or watched the cartoons no doubt saw all this coming already. Kinda ticks me off though, since this means the writers decided to tweak with Batman's origins by having him trained in his crime fighting techniques by one of his worst enemies...
The meeting with Ra's doesn't go so great either, as Bruce is forced to the feign drunk and send his party guests home... after offending them all by calling them shallow, two-faced hangers-on who only associate with him because they're not good enough to be him. Though not the most socially acceptable form of vacating the manor, it works and all the stuffed shirt snobs run home with their noses in the air. This leaves Bruce free to confront Ra's...
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
... who is revealed to have been the Scarecrow's mysterious supporter, as well as the one responsible for the theft of the microwave generator. Though the 'Crow's fear toxin (made by the same blue flowers used by the Brotherhood of Shadows in their ceremonies) is only effective in gas form, he and his henchmen have spent the last few weeks saturating Gotham's water supply with it. Once the microwave generator is turned on, it'll evaporate the water out of Gotham's pipes, thus leaving behind nothing more than a mass fog of fear gas that will send the whole of the city's denizens into chaos!
With everybody else gone, Bruce gets into his showdown with Ra's and his clan of ninjas. The playboy is soundly trounced though...
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
... and stately Wayne Manor is burned to the ground in the process. Bruce would've ended up the same way, crushed under falling debris, but Alfred saves him and the two escape into the Bat Cave. The fire is later explained in the local paper as being the results of a drunken accident made by the billionaire playboy. One of the funniest moments of the movie actually.
Beaten but not defeated, our hero dons his work clothes and sets out to stop the evil machinations of Ra's and his extremist ninja terrorist group. It's a task made all the more difficult though when the corrupt police force, much of which has been infiltrated by the likes of Al Ghul's homies, decides to release all the inmates at Arkham. To escalate things beyond the "oh crap, this sucks" level, the city's also coming under an attack of Fear Gas™, making everybody in the Narrows (i.e. "the ghetto") section of town mad with terror. Rioting breaks out and the police force is struggling to keep up. Of course Gordon and Rachel find themselves stuck in the middle of it, along with a little Batfan brat that Rachel runs into along the way.
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
Though I can't confirm this just yet, I swear that the kid says his name is Tim Drake at one point. Tim Drake, as many of you should know, becomes Robin later on in the Bat mythos.
We also see a little more of Dr. Crane, who comes riding in through the madness on a police horse, leading to one crazy moment of sever hallucinations and future night-mares... get it, "night-mares", cuz he's riding a horse? Shut up.
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Rach takes the bad guy out with a heavy dose of air tasers to the face! This leaves his foot stuck in the stirrups of his saddle as he's dragged away by his panicking equine transportation. Kinda reminds me of a morbid Three Stooges skit...
Bats helps Rachel and her little buddy escape the city of crazies, takes down a few inmates, knocks out some ninjas and scares the living shit out of half the poopulation (come on, laugh damn it!) of Gotham before hitching a ride on the ill-fated Gotham monorail to fight Ra's Al Ghul. The two fight it out in the front car for the fate of Gotham City...
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... and it all ends in flames and wreckage when the train goes off track, thanks to the help of Jim-Bob Gordon who blows out some support columns in the monorail's track... using the Bat-Tank-Mobile... retarded.
With the day saved, all that's left is for Rachel and Bruce to straighten out their relationship...
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
... which doesn't end well considering Bruce revealed his dual personality to Rachel during the rioting. She figures she can't be with a man who'd rather fight crime in a cape then explore her legal briefs. As for her nipples, they refuse to be restrained by her shirt and insist upon making their own tribute to Mary Jane's sopping wet rack ala Spider-Man. So, for now, the two childhood friends go their separate ways. It's probably better for the both of them anyway, since Bruce and Alfred have a mansion to rebuild. Oh yeah, and Bruce fires the head of Wayne Enterprises (Rutger Hauer) and puts Lucius in charge.
With all of his lady business and white collar responsibilities straightened out, Bruce can back to building his legacy as a symbol of fear and a crusader for good, starting with his next case...
>>SPOILERS WITHIN! CLICK AT YOUR OWN RISK!<<
... a guy wanted for robbery and a double homicide who has a tendency to leave a calling card at his crimes: a playing card. Do I really need to tell you which of the 54 cards in a regulation poker deck it is? Yeah, I didn't think so.
The whole scene leaps beyond the "tongue in cheek" realm and goes violently cascading through "tongue stabbing straight through the cheek and directly into the eye" territory. Everybody else at the theater was clapping and giggling like morons though, so maybe I'm just a grumpy old fart who hates the world... or at least white people. Screw you Whitey. Call me the Whitey Whacker!
Okay, down to the nitty-gritty. The acting, for the most part, I really sank my fangs into. This cast is like tenderloin to my movie watching pallet. Christian Bale was all I expected him to be: awesome as Bruce Wayne, intimidating as all fuck as Batman... at least acting like Batman... I'll explain the rest of that statement later. Morgan Freeman was a funny bastard as Lucius, Gary Oldman was great as Sgt. Jim Gordon, Cilian Murphy was pretty slick as Dr. Crane. Rutger Hauer was a slimy enough ass as the jerk-off head of Wayne Enterprises and Liam Neeson was adequate as Ducard. On the other end of the spectrum though, Ken Wantanabe made a lame ass Ra's Al Ghul, I didn't believe Michael Caine as Alfred (I'd close my eyes and all I'd hear was Austin Powers' father...) and Katie Holmes is just a barf bag of an actress as it is. I had my suspicions she was crap before this movie, and these were only proven after the movie. I didn't believe a damned word coming out of that mouth and I wanted to spit on her more than once. If only she'd drown in that damn creek all those years ago...
The writing was a mixed bag. Props to Goyer and Nolan for getting Batman right for the first time ever on screen. Boo on them for messing with parts of Bruce Wayne's training to fit their own needs. Props for the funny lines and intense Batman interrogation lines. Boos for the lines that were meant to be funny, but instead induced groans and increased bile production... with the exception of the jackass who sat behind me and LAUGHED OUTLOUD AT EVERY FUCKING JOKE. He's dead now, so don't worry about him ruining your movie experience. Props for the little winks to the fanboys and girls (Mr. Zsasz!). Boos for the overdone end scene. Come on, there are better ways what could've been handled without literally slapping us across the genitals with it! Like I said: a mixed bag.
As for direction, I think Chris Nolan did a decent enough job on most everything... note that when I say "most", there's at least one thing wrong. In this case, that one thing is VERY wrong. I'm talking "Nuns molesting amputees" wrong! Mr. Nolan, people don't like fight scenes were no one can understand what the fuck it is they're looking at. The "shaky cam extreme close-up" method only manages to blur everything and piss off the audience. If we have a choice of "being thrown right into the action" or "watching from a safe, omniscient view where we can see everything that's going on", 97% of us will take the latter as opposed to the former. If I wanted to know what it was like to be in the middle of a fight, I'd make fun of Irish people on St. Patrick's day or wear a white sheet over my head while marching through the Bronx. One of the great things about watching Batman is seeing him kick peoples' heads in. You've denied me this pleasure and you'll suffer for it if you ever pull this crap on me again. I COULDN'T EVEN TELL WHETHER OR NOT BATMAN WAS EVEN IN HALF THE FRIGGIN FIGHT SCENES! I did however dig the "vibrating tremor cam" for all the hallucination scenes. Always a big fan of that in a movie.
As for the visuals of everything, dark, moody atmospheres are always nice. The Bat-Tank-Mobile, despite being unnecessarily too "Hummer-ish", looked good during the car chase sequence. The costume was a little too dark though. Since when has Batman ever decked himself from head-to-toe in solid black?! He's always worn a grey color suit with a big black bat symbol or black bat on a yellow field symbol on the chest. Even in the Tim Burton movies, he at least wore something on his chest that set off his corporate logo. With the stark black costume, you can't even see his insignia! How are the marketing people supposed to sell that?! The real killer for me on the costume was the cowl. I don't know if it was Bale's shoulders or just the mold of the costume, but he looked like a friggin' pinhead! It starts off thick at the neck/jaw area, then tapers off to a near point at the top! Sweet hang gliding Jesus that annoyed the crap out of me! Additionally, Bale looks horrible in that cowl. He obviously doesn't have an extra sac of turkey neck hanging from his chin, but one appears from nowhere once the mask goes on! It looks like he's smuggling an extra scrotum pinched between his jaw line and the opening of the mask, and there's NO way I can look at that and still take him seriously. Even as a criminal I'd still be too busy laughing at all that neck fat to be intimidating, suspended by a thing wire from 20 stories up or not. I can't believe nobody looked at that when this was all said and done and didn't try to go back and digitally deflate some of that face. Shit, if they can do it for Lindsey Lohan's fat fake titties, then they could at least give Bale's second chin a shot.
I was also disappointed in the villains. Scarecrow, despite having more screen time than Ra's, seemed like such a second class citizen throughout the entire flick. Additionally, I was hoping for at least one scene in which he'd be decked out in full Scarecrow regalia, preferably the whole "evil southern minister with a noose around his neck" look he was sporting in the latter days of "The Adventures of Batman and Robin" when he was voiced by Jeffrey Combs. But, instead, we get a skinny guy in a suit and tie wearing a tattered cloth mask for a total of about 73 seconds. Blah. As for Ra's, I can understand not wanting to complicate the movie too much for the "uneducated" viewers, but was it necessary to cut out any and all mentions of either the Lazarus Pit OR super sexy assassin daughter Talia!? No, it wasn't. If nothing else, the movie needed at least ONE hot broad dressed in a leather cat suit.
All in all I give Batman Begins a par for the course. If the little problems didn't wear on my nerves like a dose of Ebola, I would've bumped it up further. Give me fight scenes I can actually follow, a better sculpted cowl, at least one shot of the Lazarus Pit in action and a scene of Scarecrow in full duds and this could've been an easy 4-out-of-5. Instead, I stand by my mid-level grading and, much like Revenge of the Sith, I don't care how many media tools try to brainwash me otherwise, this is not the best Batman movie since Empire...
Some reviews I've read say that this is guaranteed to be the best movie of the summer, but then I don't see these reviewers making offers to reimburse your $10 if you don't agree with them afterwards. I don't know if these people are blinded by the afterglow of finally getting a good Batman movie or if they just have a complete lack of faith in what the next few months have in store, but I'll hold my judgment until I'm typing my eulogy on Labor Day. I finally saw Episode III the day of this review (bought a bootleg from a little old Korean lady at Duncan Donuts™, cuz I'd rather she get my Alexander Hamilton than George "Rapeman" Lucas), and so far the summer of 2005 has yet to impress. Will Fantastic Four change all that? Doubtful, but I won't discount it till I've lived through it...
In a small bit of homage to the almighty Andy Borntreger's return to badmovies.org, I'd like to leave you all with my very own...
Things I learned from Batman Begins:
Never store 12 tons of gunpowder in an open area where randomly airborne burning hot branding irons might come into contact with it.
When falling down an icy slope, it's possible to dig your hand into said ice at the last moment to save yourself from falling over a cliff. Not only will it be strong enough to support your weight, but the weight of a man slightly larger than yourself (body armor for both included), and yet it will be easy enough for you to jam your hand through it and get a strong grip on.
The general exits to big expensive theaters attending by disgustingly wealthy people apparently lead directly into filthy alleyways in which no natural light can ever penetrate..
When a man is tied to the front of a spotlight, some people will confuse it as being a giant bat symbol in the sky... or "signal" as the case may be...
Batman has 10,000 cowls... wait, make that 9,999.
Katie Holmes is a terrible actress. I had my suspicions before seeing this movie, but Batman Begins has eradicated all doubt.
Which brings me to my last revelation: I've become bored with nipples... unless they're on a pair of "Troma Tits", then I'm just horrified.
