With a new director (Christopher Nolan) and a new star (Christian Bale), the fifth entry in the Batman series, true to its title, returns to square one: how and why Bruce Wayne came to be Batman; the psychological root of his fixation on flying mammals; the part this played in his guilt over his parents' murder; in short, the logic, the reasoning, behind the selection of his chiropteran crime-fighting persona. Think of it, more exactly, as Batman Starts Over or Batman Backs Up. Think of it, in other words, as a prequel. The starting-over will naturally mean that the storytelling takes a good long time to get to the Batsuit, the Batcave, the Batmobile, and all the appurtenances. But the starting-over also means, not so naturally, a new intensity, a new purpose, a new attitude, a straighter face. All this intensity, etc., cuts two ways: it lends a degree of conviction to the goings-on, and yet it risks looking ridiculous once it runs into the Batsuit, the Batcave, etc. Can an air of seriousness feasibly be sustained? (For all his lack of superpowers, the hero floats through the air with the ease of Spider-Man if not Superman.) To help sustain that air a bit further, there is no jokey villain this time (notwithstanding a forward-looking nod to the Joker at the fadeout), but rather an apocalyptic criminal plot, fully worthy of a Fu Manchu, to do to Gotham what God did to Sodom and Gomorrah, and for similar reasons. And the nightmarish visions evoked by a "weaponized hallucinogen" (a sign of the times, a salute to Al Qaeda) are genuinely scary. On balance, the two-way cutting goes deeper in the direction of conviction than in that of ridiculousness. With Katie Holmes, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy, Tom Wilkinson, Rutger Hauer. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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