Batman: Killing The Joke
Batman Begins trumps its predecessors -- but loses vital whimsy
in the deal.
BY GREGORY WEINKAUF
There is a problem with Batman Begins, and the problem is this: Batman is inherently silly. There’s just no getting
around it. This extremely lucrative franchise is utterly cool and I enjoy and appreciate it in all its incarnations (thus far),
yet to attempt to give fully "serious treatment" to a vigilante in pointy-eared PJ’s stalking the urban shadows of
(essentially) yesteryear-America -- this is an impossible task.
Fortunately, no shortage of ambition deters this old-is-new approach by geek-fave director Christopher Nolan (whose
moody, temporal-inversion-gimmick-as-raison d’être movie Memento won over sad geezers and/or women who like lurid
male flesh) and co-screenwriter David S. Goyer (whose Batman-As-Black-Vampire-Hybrid Blade series delivered more
fulfilling chops than expected). Just as the young, lost Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, another hunk of lurid male flesh) is
instructed by his insta-mentor Ducard (Liam Neeson, hip no matter how many times he plays this role) to pluck a weird
blue flower and ascend a massive mountain in Asia (Iceland) to discover his destiny, so do Nolan and Goyer mount their
quest for The Perfect Batman Movie. I would like to suggest that this summit doesn’t represent much of a challenge
anymore -- by now, thanks to many similar projects (The Crow, The Matrix, Bale himself in Equilibrium a.k.a. Cubic,
plus hundreds of wannabes) it’s an easy ride up the ski-lift of redundancy -- but since Hollywood in its typical bass-
ackwards style hasn’t yet satisfied the teeming masses in terms of The Caped Crusader, kudos are hereby awarded to
Nolan and Goyer and their very impressive team for setting off toward their designated peak, and reaching it.
And now a simple appraisal for the fanboys: Darkity-darkity dark-dark-dark! Happy now? You should be!
That said, the narrative thrust here comes courtesy of the original Darkman, Neeson. His dubious Ducard arrives, like
Qui-Gon with a yuppie haircut and meaner attitude (possibly interrelated), to spring young Bruce from a crude prison
Somewhere In Asia. (Here the movie leaps immediately into pummeling muddy male flesh to please the homo-erotic pro-
wrestling crowd, but it also mercifully delivers some plum dialogue: In response to one of his sizeable opponents
arrogantly calling himself the devil, Bruce replies, "You’re not the devil -- you’re just practice.") Ducard quickly sets up
the aforementioned flower-up-the-mountain holiday package, and wandering Bruce soon arrives at the hyooge monastery-
lair of the mysterious (or is he?) Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Watanabe, oozing gravitas but basically playing a costume) -- who
clearly had the lofty place built just to make Théoden and Blofeld jealous. Ducard and Ra’s (Ra’s? Mr. Ghul? You can
call him Al?) and their League of Shadows ninja-lads then proceed to beat the living shit out of Bruce, because Bruce has
Fear, and we all know that the best way to deal with your Fear is to have the living shit beaten out of you.
There is a really nice early segment -- shot on the first day, actually -- featuring Ducard beating the shit out of Bruce on a
frozen lake beside a glacier, and frankly I wish that the Ice Capades could develop this sort of thing, possibly involving
beloved Disney characters, or at least Peabo Bryson Vs. Céline Dion.
(Note to self: "Peabo"?)
Anyway, this fifth Warner Bros. live-action Batman movie in sixteen years concerns itself almost entirely with the origin
of the character, and chances are you already know the story, or some version thereof. In a single sentence: Bruce
Wayne is one of those millionaire/billionaire heirs who happily grew up in a British manor house incongruously located in
the rolling green hills of America incongruously near to a massive, cruddy metropolis until he accidentally fell down a
well into a cave full of bats and then in an unrelated incident witnessed his sickeningly-wealthy-yet-impossibly-pleasant
philanthropist parents being murdered by a petty thug thus causing him as an adult to dress up like a bat in order to fight
increasingly zany criminals first out of revenge and then later perhaps as a proactive alternative to golf.
Damn! I gotta do more pitch meetings!
Anyway again: You see? Silly.
I can already feel fanboy venom spurting back about how it’s hypocritical to make fun of Batman’s plausibility while
having no major complaints with Hobbits, Elves, Wizards, denizens of Krypton (well, the first two movies, anyway) and
The frickin’ Force -- but here’s the crucial difference: All of those series (Crow, Blade and Matrix, too) are cultivated in
a realm of the supernatural (meaning here, "including elements beyond the natural environment of contemporary
humans"). In these movies (who knows what’s really out there past the parking lot?), impossible entities do impossible
things, thus all is well and generally consistent. In the very DNA of Batman, however, lies an eternal (and intermittently
charming) irritant: Bruce Wayne is human, and mortal, and lives on the same planet that you and I inhabit -- and yet he
can do quite impossible things. This makes Batman silly, and forever shall. (It is also the reason Prince was perfect to
provide songs for Tim Burton’s mostly-enjoyable 1989 attempt.)
To their credit, Goyer & Nolan (sounds like a law-firm; almost is, really) do their very best to lock Batman to the laws of
the reality most of us will find familiar. Once the outrageously devoted Wayne-family butler Alfred (Michael Caine,
collecting his cutest paycheck since Jaws: The Revenge) impossibly pinpoints wandering Bruce’s whereabouts
Somewhere In Asia and, via Wayne-family jet, whisks him back to Stately Wayne Manor, the development of Batman...
er...Begins.
Enter Logic, for better (for most people) and worse (for me personally). Since this is ostensibly the "real" Batman story,
(owing, of course, huge debts to creator Bob Kane, comic scribe Frank Miller and illustrator David Mazzuccelli), we get
seemingly endless technological explanations for the nifty Bat-doohickeys. Most of this information is curtly and
earnestly delivered by Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, Wayne Enterprises’ chief of Applied Science -- in other
words, ‘Q’ to Bruce’s Bond. (In interviews, however, Freeman has mentioned a closer link to Alec Guinness as Obi-
Wan Kenobi -- not as a character parallel, but in terms of collecting big checks for joining the right franchise. Go, Easy
Reader!) In this fashion the body-armor, grappling hooks, utility belt and even that hang-glider cape are tidily explained
(although the last, which is now dependent upon electronics, does not mesh with a scene in which Batman is
tasered -- incidentally, a personal electronic device sure to become more popular after this movie). Yep, all that cool stuff
(which Nolan fetishizes exactly as in a Rambo movie) -- it’s simply military science. And you know what? I don’t like it.
Of course, this is a matter of taste, but I don’t want everything explained. I want to be mystified. Others will differ.
One matter on which I stand firm is this revised version of the Batmobile: I hate it. It sucks. I knew I hated it when I
saw the toy, and I hate it a lot more now that I’ve seen the movie. Why? Because this "tumbler" is little more
than an armored SUV, that’s why, and SUVs are made for idiots. This movie’s vehicular action scenes are far too close
to the reality of urban American driving to be entertaining, regardless of the considerable boom-boom put forth.
(Who knows -- perhaps director Nolan, a Brit, is using his art to acclimate himself to good ol’ ‘mercan aggression.)
Gents, Batman is supposed to be sleek -- not merely another psycho in an SUV. Q.E.D.
It also bears mentioning that the aforementioned vehicle is responsible for Gary Oldman doing something genuinely
upsetting -- but in a weird new way. As mild-mannered Detective Sergeant Jim Gordon, he climbs inside the thing and
fires its cannons, and follows the blast with a Macaulay Culkin "YES!" straight out of Home Alone. Be afraid...
Speaking of which, the theme of Fear is, by far, the strongest asset of Batman Begins. Bale does some great, freakish
Tom Waits-ian croaking and shouting once he’s in the suit. The seemingly limitless waves of madly flapping digital (but
real-looking) bats should evoke a mild sense of panic in any reasonable human being. Better, Cillian Murphy (28 Days
Later) is perfectly cast as creepy psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Crane, and his alter-ego, The Scarecrow, who gases his
victims with a "panic-inducing toxin," prompting nightmarish hallucinations (especially of himself as The Unknown
Comic gone bad). Murphy also unwittingly provides the movie’s biggest laugh by dramatically referring to The
Scarecrow as "a Jungian archetype" -- I just about peed! Nonetheless, so much more interesting is he (and his Arkham
Asylum) than the movie’s traditional gangster baddie Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson, nowhere near imposing enough)
that the latter (and assorted thugs/bad cops) could have been excised without loss. (Well, it would have been unfortunate
to lose the line seemingly inspired by the current "president": "As long as he keeps the good people scared and the bad
people rich, he’ll be safe.") Falcone, while technically "canon," is merely a bully, and thus boring as hell. When The
Scarecrow appears, though, life is hell, and Nolan’s team works overtime to slap us with appropriately Sturm und
Drang-y visuals during the escalation of the ol' Gotham Is Doomed ploy. Well met!
This leads us to the overall look of Batman Begins, by production designer Nathan Crowley (late of Nolan’s Insomnia,
who worked hand-in-hand with Nolan and Goyer and devised this movie’s Crapmobile; sorry, fellow). I prefer Baroque
and flamboyant stylings in both the characters (I’d like to see costume-designer Lindy Hemming go hog-wild) and the
architecture. Crowley instead visits upon us a more "realistically" rich and convincing Bat-world, ranging from the
commuter-friendly Wayne trains high above Gotham (which itself is like Chicago on steroids -- since it basically is
Chicago on steroids) to various creepy crime-spree locales to a richly-detailed Wayne Manor and the dank, horrid,
wonderfully-constructed Bat-cave beneath. Particularly in rainy Gotham, one can feel Nolan and Crowley praying to
fallen deity Ridley Scott for bestowing upon us the miracle of Blade Runner (also worshipped by Goyer with director
Alex Proyas in the astounding Dark City), and the result is truly comforting -- like, whew, somebody is copying this
right! (This praise includes the music by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, who were both evidently instructed
to duplicate, almost, what Vangelis did for Blade Runner, only with more real instruments.)
Nolan and the producers are even savvy enough to have landed an actual cast-member from that neo-classic sci-fi noir,
in the form of Rutger Hauer as Richard Earle, the manipulative CEO of Wayne Enterprises, who has transformed the
multinational into a publicly-traded weapons manufacturer in Bruce’s long absence. (That Bruce’s own resources are
used against him and Gotham equals smart scripting.) Although Hauer isn’t allowed to do enough here, he’s properly
imposing and as welcome as tears in rain. There’s also some chick in the movie, playing a feisty assistant D.A. and
Bruce’s conveniently invented soulmate-from-childhood -- but she and her culty little boyfriend are getting enough press
elsewhere without wasting space here.
Since, coincidentally, Star Wars has also just arrived at its sixth movie, the question is begged: How does Batman Begins
rate among its predecessors (including 1966’s hilarious Batman)? This question is deceptively simple, and in order for it
to make sense, the range of the game must be widened. Yes, the highly derivative Tim Burton’s Batman was good, but
portly Jack Nicholson was absolutely, utterly wrong for The Joker and has made my eyes leak bloody tears of woe every
time I’ve glared at his feeble attempts at leers ‘n’ laffs. (I got yer Joker right here.) The fascinating (and my personal
fave) Batman Returns was written by the delightfully strange Daniel Waters (Heathers, Happy Campers), and thus
benefitted by becoming pervy. (Sorry, conservative parents: Batman is not only inherently silly, but inherently pervy.)
Which sends us -- natch! -- to those Schumacher variations: nothing really wrong with those; apart from George
Clooney being tedious, all was well with their flamboyance and increasingly comic-bookish stylings. Sort of a return to
the fun fluff of Leslie H. Martinson’s mid-60s camp classic.
Now let it be said: Adam West and Burt Ward rock. And cowls off to the glorious and storied Lee Meriwether -- still the
finest Catwoman, and that's saying plenty. Oh, Kitka.
(Amusing aside: It was once my pleasure to encounter Mr. West and Frank "The Riddler" Gorshin emerging from a
comic convention at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium. They had been signing autographs inside for several hours. A few steps
out into the blinding sunlight, West turned to Gorshin and said, "Well, that was some day -- where to now?" and Gorshin
replied, "Let’s go get drunk." This moment was priceless. Farewell, Mr. Riddler.)
But Batman isn’t what it’s all about. There is no "Best" (even though the animated Mask of the Phantasm amazed me).
What we’re really looking at is a general appraisal of The Avenging Dork (a term snagged from Elvis Costello's legend,
but since he’s busily re-releasing King of America for the fourth or fifth time I doubt he’ll notice). A classic like Terry
Gilliam’s Brazil is about an Avenging Dork (plus it features Harry Tuttle, my fave Urban Superhero). Come to think of it,
almost all superheroes are Avenging Dorks. An overrated tantrum like Fight Club is also about an Avenging Dork. The
granddaddy of these dystopia movies, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, could be viewed as an Avenging Dork movie. Haman may
be defined as an Avenging Dork, as may Shylock. Al Pacino has made a career out of playing Avenging Dorks, not least
of which is his turn as Tony Montana in Scarface. (I recently overheard a teenage urban youth inform his friends,
"Scarface my idol." Shudder. No verb.) The list goes on...
The main gist is that we’ve got a lot of Lost Boys and Avenging Dorks out there, and nowhere near enough Intelligent
Adult Males to help guide them into happy and useful lives. Thus the enormous success of Star Wars and/or Batman and
many related ventures. It is, again, very much to the credit of Goyer & Nolan that in their obsessive quest for "reality"
they recognize this major theme in Bob Kane’s invention, and allow their protagonist to struggle, visibly, with the popular
desire for bloody revenge -- and to learn, with the assistance of his masculine elders and his feminine counterpart, the
much more valuable path to justice.
So is it a Great Batman Movie? Yes. Is it The Great Batman Movie? No. I think that end product is yet to come. But you
may be reading a writer with uncommon tastes: I sincerely believe that the Best Cinematic Comic Book Adaptation thus
far -- for being sharp, smart, stylish and shamelessly silly -- is Rachel Talalay’s Tank Girl.
Batman Begins
Entertainment Value: 8/13
Style: 9/13
Philosophical Insight: 7/13
-Gregory Weinkauf, 10 June, 2005
This review is kindly and respectfully dedicated to Bill "Big Kahuna" Liebowitz, late creator of Golden Apple Enterprises,
and to his family, nuclear and extended. Ten years ago you gave a job and a shot at understanding comics to a vagabond
who somehow missed that education in childhood. Thanks and blessings.
Batman Begins trumps its predecessors -- but loses vital whimsy
in the deal.
BY GREGORY WEINKAUF
There is a problem with Batman Begins, and the problem is this: Batman is inherently silly. There’s just no getting
around it. This extremely lucrative franchise is utterly cool and I enjoy and appreciate it in all its incarnations (thus far),
yet to attempt to give fully "serious treatment" to a vigilante in pointy-eared PJ’s stalking the urban shadows of
(essentially) yesteryear-America -- this is an impossible task.
Fortunately, no shortage of ambition deters this old-is-new approach by geek-fave director Christopher Nolan (whose
moody, temporal-inversion-gimmick-as-raison d’être movie Memento won over sad geezers and/or women who like lurid
male flesh) and co-screenwriter David S. Goyer (whose Batman-As-Black-Vampire-Hybrid Blade series delivered more
fulfilling chops than expected). Just as the young, lost Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, another hunk of lurid male flesh) is
instructed by his insta-mentor Ducard (Liam Neeson, hip no matter how many times he plays this role) to pluck a weird
blue flower and ascend a massive mountain in Asia (Iceland) to discover his destiny, so do Nolan and Goyer mount their
quest for The Perfect Batman Movie. I would like to suggest that this summit doesn’t represent much of a challenge
anymore -- by now, thanks to many similar projects (The Crow, The Matrix, Bale himself in Equilibrium a.k.a. Cubic,
plus hundreds of wannabes) it’s an easy ride up the ski-lift of redundancy -- but since Hollywood in its typical bass-
ackwards style hasn’t yet satisfied the teeming masses in terms of The Caped Crusader, kudos are hereby awarded to
Nolan and Goyer and their very impressive team for setting off toward their designated peak, and reaching it.
And now a simple appraisal for the fanboys: Darkity-darkity dark-dark-dark! Happy now? You should be!
That said, the narrative thrust here comes courtesy of the original Darkman, Neeson. His dubious Ducard arrives, like
Qui-Gon with a yuppie haircut and meaner attitude (possibly interrelated), to spring young Bruce from a crude prison
Somewhere In Asia. (Here the movie leaps immediately into pummeling muddy male flesh to please the homo-erotic pro-
wrestling crowd, but it also mercifully delivers some plum dialogue: In response to one of his sizeable opponents
arrogantly calling himself the devil, Bruce replies, "You’re not the devil -- you’re just practice.") Ducard quickly sets up
the aforementioned flower-up-the-mountain holiday package, and wandering Bruce soon arrives at the hyooge monastery-
lair of the mysterious (or is he?) Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Watanabe, oozing gravitas but basically playing a costume) -- who
clearly had the lofty place built just to make Théoden and Blofeld jealous. Ducard and Ra’s (Ra’s? Mr. Ghul? You can
call him Al?) and their League of Shadows ninja-lads then proceed to beat the living shit out of Bruce, because Bruce has
Fear, and we all know that the best way to deal with your Fear is to have the living shit beaten out of you.
There is a really nice early segment -- shot on the first day, actually -- featuring Ducard beating the shit out of Bruce on a
frozen lake beside a glacier, and frankly I wish that the Ice Capades could develop this sort of thing, possibly involving
beloved Disney characters, or at least Peabo Bryson Vs. Céline Dion.
(Note to self: "Peabo"?)
Anyway, this fifth Warner Bros. live-action Batman movie in sixteen years concerns itself almost entirely with the origin
of the character, and chances are you already know the story, or some version thereof. In a single sentence: Bruce
Wayne is one of those millionaire/billionaire heirs who happily grew up in a British manor house incongruously located in
the rolling green hills of America incongruously near to a massive, cruddy metropolis until he accidentally fell down a
well into a cave full of bats and then in an unrelated incident witnessed his sickeningly-wealthy-yet-impossibly-pleasant
philanthropist parents being murdered by a petty thug thus causing him as an adult to dress up like a bat in order to fight
increasingly zany criminals first out of revenge and then later perhaps as a proactive alternative to golf.
Damn! I gotta do more pitch meetings!
Anyway again: You see? Silly.
I can already feel fanboy venom spurting back about how it’s hypocritical to make fun of Batman’s plausibility while
having no major complaints with Hobbits, Elves, Wizards, denizens of Krypton (well, the first two movies, anyway) and
The frickin’ Force -- but here’s the crucial difference: All of those series (Crow, Blade and Matrix, too) are cultivated in
a realm of the supernatural (meaning here, "including elements beyond the natural environment of contemporary
humans"). In these movies (who knows what’s really out there past the parking lot?), impossible entities do impossible
things, thus all is well and generally consistent. In the very DNA of Batman, however, lies an eternal (and intermittently
charming) irritant: Bruce Wayne is human, and mortal, and lives on the same planet that you and I inhabit -- and yet he
can do quite impossible things. This makes Batman silly, and forever shall. (It is also the reason Prince was perfect to
provide songs for Tim Burton’s mostly-enjoyable 1989 attempt.)
To their credit, Goyer & Nolan (sounds like a law-firm; almost is, really) do their very best to lock Batman to the laws of
the reality most of us will find familiar. Once the outrageously devoted Wayne-family butler Alfred (Michael Caine,
collecting his cutest paycheck since Jaws: The Revenge) impossibly pinpoints wandering Bruce’s whereabouts
Somewhere In Asia and, via Wayne-family jet, whisks him back to Stately Wayne Manor, the development of Batman...
er...Begins.
Enter Logic, for better (for most people) and worse (for me personally). Since this is ostensibly the "real" Batman story,
(owing, of course, huge debts to creator Bob Kane, comic scribe Frank Miller and illustrator David Mazzuccelli), we get
seemingly endless technological explanations for the nifty Bat-doohickeys. Most of this information is curtly and
earnestly delivered by Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, Wayne Enterprises’ chief of Applied Science -- in other
words, ‘Q’ to Bruce’s Bond. (In interviews, however, Freeman has mentioned a closer link to Alec Guinness as Obi-
Wan Kenobi -- not as a character parallel, but in terms of collecting big checks for joining the right franchise. Go, Easy
Reader!) In this fashion the body-armor, grappling hooks, utility belt and even that hang-glider cape are tidily explained
(although the last, which is now dependent upon electronics, does not mesh with a scene in which Batman is
tasered -- incidentally, a personal electronic device sure to become more popular after this movie). Yep, all that cool stuff
(which Nolan fetishizes exactly as in a Rambo movie) -- it’s simply military science. And you know what? I don’t like it.
Of course, this is a matter of taste, but I don’t want everything explained. I want to be mystified. Others will differ.
One matter on which I stand firm is this revised version of the Batmobile: I hate it. It sucks. I knew I hated it when I
saw the toy, and I hate it a lot more now that I’ve seen the movie. Why? Because this "tumbler" is little more
than an armored SUV, that’s why, and SUVs are made for idiots. This movie’s vehicular action scenes are far too close
to the reality of urban American driving to be entertaining, regardless of the considerable boom-boom put forth.
(Who knows -- perhaps director Nolan, a Brit, is using his art to acclimate himself to good ol’ ‘mercan aggression.)
Gents, Batman is supposed to be sleek -- not merely another psycho in an SUV. Q.E.D.
It also bears mentioning that the aforementioned vehicle is responsible for Gary Oldman doing something genuinely
upsetting -- but in a weird new way. As mild-mannered Detective Sergeant Jim Gordon, he climbs inside the thing and
fires its cannons, and follows the blast with a Macaulay Culkin "YES!" straight out of Home Alone. Be afraid...
Speaking of which, the theme of Fear is, by far, the strongest asset of Batman Begins. Bale does some great, freakish
Tom Waits-ian croaking and shouting once he’s in the suit. The seemingly limitless waves of madly flapping digital (but
real-looking) bats should evoke a mild sense of panic in any reasonable human being. Better, Cillian Murphy (28 Days
Later) is perfectly cast as creepy psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Crane, and his alter-ego, The Scarecrow, who gases his
victims with a "panic-inducing toxin," prompting nightmarish hallucinations (especially of himself as The Unknown
Comic gone bad). Murphy also unwittingly provides the movie’s biggest laugh by dramatically referring to The
Scarecrow as "a Jungian archetype" -- I just about peed! Nonetheless, so much more interesting is he (and his Arkham
Asylum) than the movie’s traditional gangster baddie Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson, nowhere near imposing enough)
that the latter (and assorted thugs/bad cops) could have been excised without loss. (Well, it would have been unfortunate
to lose the line seemingly inspired by the current "president": "As long as he keeps the good people scared and the bad
people rich, he’ll be safe.") Falcone, while technically "canon," is merely a bully, and thus boring as hell. When The
Scarecrow appears, though, life is hell, and Nolan’s team works overtime to slap us with appropriately Sturm und
Drang-y visuals during the escalation of the ol' Gotham Is Doomed ploy. Well met!
This leads us to the overall look of Batman Begins, by production designer Nathan Crowley (late of Nolan’s Insomnia,
who worked hand-in-hand with Nolan and Goyer and devised this movie’s Crapmobile; sorry, fellow). I prefer Baroque
and flamboyant stylings in both the characters (I’d like to see costume-designer Lindy Hemming go hog-wild) and the
architecture. Crowley instead visits upon us a more "realistically" rich and convincing Bat-world, ranging from the
commuter-friendly Wayne trains high above Gotham (which itself is like Chicago on steroids -- since it basically is
Chicago on steroids) to various creepy crime-spree locales to a richly-detailed Wayne Manor and the dank, horrid,
wonderfully-constructed Bat-cave beneath. Particularly in rainy Gotham, one can feel Nolan and Crowley praying to
fallen deity Ridley Scott for bestowing upon us the miracle of Blade Runner (also worshipped by Goyer with director
Alex Proyas in the astounding Dark City), and the result is truly comforting -- like, whew, somebody is copying this
right! (This praise includes the music by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, who were both evidently instructed
to duplicate, almost, what Vangelis did for Blade Runner, only with more real instruments.)
Nolan and the producers are even savvy enough to have landed an actual cast-member from that neo-classic sci-fi noir,
in the form of Rutger Hauer as Richard Earle, the manipulative CEO of Wayne Enterprises, who has transformed the
multinational into a publicly-traded weapons manufacturer in Bruce’s long absence. (That Bruce’s own resources are
used against him and Gotham equals smart scripting.) Although Hauer isn’t allowed to do enough here, he’s properly
imposing and as welcome as tears in rain. There’s also some chick in the movie, playing a feisty assistant D.A. and
Bruce’s conveniently invented soulmate-from-childhood -- but she and her culty little boyfriend are getting enough press
elsewhere without wasting space here.
Since, coincidentally, Star Wars has also just arrived at its sixth movie, the question is begged: How does Batman Begins
rate among its predecessors (including 1966’s hilarious Batman)? This question is deceptively simple, and in order for it
to make sense, the range of the game must be widened. Yes, the highly derivative Tim Burton’s Batman was good, but
portly Jack Nicholson was absolutely, utterly wrong for The Joker and has made my eyes leak bloody tears of woe every
time I’ve glared at his feeble attempts at leers ‘n’ laffs. (I got yer Joker right here.) The fascinating (and my personal
fave) Batman Returns was written by the delightfully strange Daniel Waters (Heathers, Happy Campers), and thus
benefitted by becoming pervy. (Sorry, conservative parents: Batman is not only inherently silly, but inherently pervy.)
Which sends us -- natch! -- to those Schumacher variations: nothing really wrong with those; apart from George
Clooney being tedious, all was well with their flamboyance and increasingly comic-bookish stylings. Sort of a return to
the fun fluff of Leslie H. Martinson’s mid-60s camp classic.
Now let it be said: Adam West and Burt Ward rock. And cowls off to the glorious and storied Lee Meriwether -- still the
finest Catwoman, and that's saying plenty. Oh, Kitka.
(Amusing aside: It was once my pleasure to encounter Mr. West and Frank "The Riddler" Gorshin emerging from a
comic convention at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium. They had been signing autographs inside for several hours. A few steps
out into the blinding sunlight, West turned to Gorshin and said, "Well, that was some day -- where to now?" and Gorshin
replied, "Let’s go get drunk." This moment was priceless. Farewell, Mr. Riddler.)
But Batman isn’t what it’s all about. There is no "Best" (even though the animated Mask of the Phantasm amazed me).
What we’re really looking at is a general appraisal of The Avenging Dork (a term snagged from Elvis Costello's legend,
but since he’s busily re-releasing King of America for the fourth or fifth time I doubt he’ll notice). A classic like Terry
Gilliam’s Brazil is about an Avenging Dork (plus it features Harry Tuttle, my fave Urban Superhero). Come to think of it,
almost all superheroes are Avenging Dorks. An overrated tantrum like Fight Club is also about an Avenging Dork. The
granddaddy of these dystopia movies, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, could be viewed as an Avenging Dork movie. Haman may
be defined as an Avenging Dork, as may Shylock. Al Pacino has made a career out of playing Avenging Dorks, not least
of which is his turn as Tony Montana in Scarface. (I recently overheard a teenage urban youth inform his friends,
"Scarface my idol." Shudder. No verb.) The list goes on...
The main gist is that we’ve got a lot of Lost Boys and Avenging Dorks out there, and nowhere near enough Intelligent
Adult Males to help guide them into happy and useful lives. Thus the enormous success of Star Wars and/or Batman and
many related ventures. It is, again, very much to the credit of Goyer & Nolan that in their obsessive quest for "reality"
they recognize this major theme in Bob Kane’s invention, and allow their protagonist to struggle, visibly, with the popular
desire for bloody revenge -- and to learn, with the assistance of his masculine elders and his feminine counterpart, the
much more valuable path to justice.
So is it a Great Batman Movie? Yes. Is it The Great Batman Movie? No. I think that end product is yet to come. But you
may be reading a writer with uncommon tastes: I sincerely believe that the Best Cinematic Comic Book Adaptation thus
far -- for being sharp, smart, stylish and shamelessly silly -- is Rachel Talalay’s Tank Girl.
Batman Begins
Entertainment Value: 8/13
Style: 9/13
Philosophical Insight: 7/13
-Gregory Weinkauf, 10 June, 2005
This review is kindly and respectfully dedicated to Bill "Big Kahuna" Liebowitz, late creator of Golden Apple Enterprises,
and to his family, nuclear and extended. Ten years ago you gave a job and a shot at understanding comics to a vagabond
who somehow missed that education in childhood. Thanks and blessings.
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| TOO..........MANY..........STAIRS! © 2005 Warner Bros. Pictures |