‘Batman Begins’ a lesser version of latest ‘Star Wars’
“Your anger gives you great power — but if you let it, it will destroy you.”
Advice from the manipulative Chancellor Palpatine to malleable Anakin Skywalker, as the young Jedi teeters on the edge of becoming Darth Vader in the most recent “Star Wars” prequel?
Close.
Those words of warning actually come from the mysterious mentor to Bruce Wayne, the industrial heir on the verge of embracing his own dark side for the sake of good and transforming himself into Batman in “Batman Begins.”
Although we all know which came first in this chicken-and-egg scenario, comparisons between these summer blockbusters are inevitable, as both reveal the back stories of iconic pop-culture figures.
Some of the same sorts of revelations that give “Revenge of the Sith” a sense of geeky adolescent wonder surface here, too: the joy of discovering how Bruce (Christian Bale) develops the Batcave, the Batsuit and the Batmobile (rendered here like a gas-guzzling Hummer, nothing like the sleek Corvette-style Batmobile in which Michael Keaton tooled around the streets of Gotham back in 1989).
But except for a few quips from the formidable supporting cast — including Michael Caine as an ideal Alfred the butler and Morgan Freeman as Bruce’s equivalent of Q from the James Bond films — “Batman Begins” is suffocatingly self-serious. And to continue the comparison, that only makes “Sith” look superior.
Yes, the Dark Knight is supposed to be a tormented soul, having witnessed his parents’ murder and used that guilt and anger as the inspiration for his nighttime forays into vigilante justice. You won’t find any nipples in the Batsuit here, which should appease the purists who were appalled by the Joel Schumacherization of the franchise with “Batman Forever” and “Batman & Robin” in the mid-1990s.
But at least Schumacher (and Tim Burton more successfully before him) put their own directorial stamps on their films. It’s hard to tell that “Batman Begins” began with Christopher Nolan, the mastermind behind “Memento,” one of the most inventive films in recent memory.
As director and co-writer (with David S. Goyer, who also wrote the “Blade” movies based on the comic books), Nolan takes an admirable stab at developing a character-driven drama, only to give in to generic action-movie conventions with a blinding, deafening, explosion-laden finale that could have capped off any number of interchangeable Jerry Bruckheimer flicks.
There are also some surprising inconsistencies throughout the script, such as the jarring morning-after-the-destruction scene, and the fact that Bruce is presumed dead for seven years while secretly training to become Batman (Liam Neeson plays his mentor, yet another “Star Wars” reminder), and no one is shocked to see him alive and well when he returns to save Gotham from crime and corruption.