Thanks, I Hate It: Batman Begins

Batman Begins starts with the self-assured assumption that Batman is extremely serious. From there it proceeds to establish a strictly business version of the caped crusader, one trained by ninjas (and Liam Neeson) in the mountains of Bhutan and crushed under the weight of his responsibility to the corrupt and ailing Gotham City. In its own self-serious way it's more ridiculous than Adam West's slapstick incarnation of the famous superhero, spinning an amusing children's character into a stiff-necked martinet beating his way through Gotham's underworld. It has the trappings of an adult treatment of vigilantism but none of the groundwork necessary to bring them together into any kind of meaningful shape. 

From Hans Zimmer's bombastically generic score -- the template for a full decade and a half of booming, indistinguishable chase and fight music -- to its dull, dingy costumes and militaristic gadget design, Batman Begins is reminiscent of nothing so much as those hyper-detailed action figures they sell for forty bucks at comic book stores. It's a child's toy resculpted into something alien to children. The sword fights on frozen lakes, the flatly delivered dialogue about crime, justice, and responsibility, the wooden romance between Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne and Katie Holmes' Rachel Dawes; none of it has substance. Straddling the line between silly entertainment and serious drama, it manages to suspend itself in midair with neither foot touching the ground.

The hallucinogen-induced visions of writhing parasites and vermin are one of the film's few visual pleasures, and they trail off into more generic scary glowing eyes and mouths. The film's final act is its worst, discarding the functional if unimpressive detective story in favor of a lackluster city in peril plot. Hordes of mentally ill asylum inmates hopped up on psychoactive gas spread by  a cabal of elite ninjas menace Rachel and a wide-eyed child (Jack Gleeson, the future Joffrey Baratheon), giving Batman an excellent excuse to beat them in the street. Much as the tank-like appearance of the batmobile invokes a military atmosphere, Batman's struggle against hulking prisoners gives a fascist flavor to the film's bone-breaking violence.

Speaking of violence, the immobile neck of the batsuit renders the movie's fight scenes faintly absurd as Bale twists his entire body back and forth along with his fists. It's a perfect metaphor for the film itself, an action movie too intent on being grown-up to acknowledge its own inherent ridiculousness. It relies instead on covering everything with a thick, cloying coat of weatherized black paint and lighting like a grubby spotlit crime scene to manufacture an aesthetic somewhere between noir and war movie but without the mystery of the former or the vulnerable chaos of the latter. Batman Begins is boring, ugly, and smugly secure in its own vapid aesthetic.