Rating:

Originally published June 15, 2005

What you remember about Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins is the human struggle of Bruce Wayne, played by Christian Bale with a melancholy ordinarily reserved for Hamlet.

In other words, Burton's Batman is visual licorice while Nolan's origin story is a deep-dish drama. This story about a youth avenging his father's murder is unusually well-written (by Nolan and David S. Goyer) and well-acted (by Bale and Michael Caine as Alfred the butler).

Yet in a movie with so much going for it, where such obvious care was taken with the script and performances, is it too much to ask that the action sequences not be monotonously, narcotizingly dull?

Where the 1989 Batman had visual elegance and narrative clunk, the 2005 Batman is exactly the opposite. While you admire a comic book movie that aspires to literature, you also expect pulse-pumping dynamism, which you don't get here.

The fundamental difference between Burton's Batman and that of Nolan, the English filmmaker who made his reputation with Memento, is not one between American visual flash and British verbal panache. It's that Burton gives us SuperDude; Nolan gives us Sir Subdued.

Wait, you ask, isn't Batman supposed to be American? What with the Wales-born Bale, the Cockney Caine, and Irishman Liam Neeson as a mysterious figure named Henri Ducard, Gotham feels like London, even though the exteriors were shot in Chicago.

Nolan doesn't reimagine Batman so much as Harry Potterize him (thereby extending two Warner Bros. franchises), opening the film with Bruce Wayne's primal traumas. First a swarm of bats attacks young Bruce (Gus Lewis) when he falls into a well. Thus does the future Bat Cave begin as a literal bat cave.

Then the lad accompanies his socialite (but socially conscious) parents to the opera, where a mugger murders them, leaving Bruce in the care of the infinitely wise and patient Alfred.

Bruce also has a female friend, Rachel, who grows up to be Katie Holmes, the assistant district attorney of corrupt Gotham. While Bruce drops out of Princeton and travels the world learning about the criminal mind in Chinese jails and about martial arts from the shadowy Ducard, Rachel waits for him.

Harry Potter possesses magical powers. But Batman is the superhero without superpowers. He has to work at being quicker, tougher, nimbler. Nolan puts Bruce through his paces at a ninja camp in the Himalayas. But while Bruce's teachers want to profit by destroying Gotham City, Bruce/Batman wants to reclaim it.

You would not expect Bale, whose brow is heavy with introspection and whose meaty underlip is thrust with pleasing pensiveness, to fill the job description, but fill and fulfill it he does. Even when he's just the mouth under the cowl, Bale is electric.

He is ably supported by Caine and Morgan Freeman (as Lucius Fox, an employee of Wayne Industries), who dispense dry humor that the two-hour, 21-minute film could use more of.

In the 65 years since Batman's birth in D.C. Comics, the caped crusader has effectively represented the spirit of successive generations. In the '60s television series, he was the square-jawed figure in a hip world. In Burton's movie he was the pessimist whose work was never done. Nolan's Gen Y Batman is the youth who believes in urban - and personal - renewal.