Bale’s Batman/Bruce Wayne is a raspy, even nasty customer, visibly uncomfortable in his bourgeois secret identity guise (watch him squirm at a near-climactic cocktail party) and really only ever comfortable in jet-black Kevlar.īatman Begins takes plenty of time getting him into the suit: the first 45 minutes, which have very little to do with Bob Kane’s original back story (and even less to do with Frank Miller’s Dark Knight graphic novel series) finds a testy, disillusioned, and long-since orphaned Bruce Wayne slumming it somewhere in the Himalayas, until he’s recruited by the super-secret terrorist cabal the League of Shadows.
He’s got the “pop jawline” Pauline Kael attributed to Christopher Reeve in Superman, but, luckily, none of Reeve’s incidental wholesomeness. Because really, what is Patrick Bateman if not the slightly crazier, NC-17 version of Batman: a fantastically endowed sociopath-playboy in thrall to his deep-seated obsessions? Well, maybe that wasn’t Adam West’s Batman, but it certainly is Bale’s. Ultimately, Nolan’s film is a triumph of casting: fan-types have been clamoring for Christian Bale since American Psycho. Batman Begins is merely pretty good-better, probably, than either of Sam Raimi’s uneven and curiously smug Spider-Man films, and at least as good as Bryan Singer’s X2: X-Men United, with which it shares both concrete virtues (seriousness of intent, pared-down design, a talented ensemble cast) and nagging flaws (structural wonkiness and an inflated running time). Christopher Nolan, U.S., Warner Bros.Ĭhristopher Nolan’s Batman Begins is a fine example of the blockbuster as amuse bouche: the pleasure lies in knowing that the main course-in this case, the inevitable sequel, which we’ll probably get sometime in 2008-might just be superb.
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