Batman Begins: Critic Reviews

A confidently original, engrossing interpretation, with a seriously thought-through (but never self-serious) aesthetic point of view that announces, from the get-go, someone who knows what he's doing is running the show.

What makes this Batman so enjoyable is how the director Christopher Nolan arranges familiar genre elements in new, unforeseen ways.

No fan of cult director Christopher Nolan is going to regard this respectable effort as anything but a comedown from 2001's Memento.

Here's how any great franchise should start: with care, precision and delicately wrought atmosphere.

A ponderous, deeply unironic psychological portrait with such a pervasive sense of gravitas that it borders on self-importance.

In Batman Begins, Christian Bale gives us the best Bruce Wayne that has ever graced the screen.

It's still an old-school superhero summer movie, the plotting tortuous, the characters relegated to one-scene-one-emotion simplicity, the digitized action a never ending club mix of chases and mano a manos.

The earlier Batman movies were charades. With Bale, it's a biopic, filled with nuance, emotion and contradictions.

Batman Begins is a remarkable movie. In making it, Nolan swept aside not only the other Batman films but the whole over-burdened shelf of previous super-hero flicks.

Director Nolan remains true to his own vision, which is largely that of the original Batman comics. As a result, Batman Begins has a unity not often found in these extravaganzas.

Here's a legend sometimes proved true: Sharp writing and thoughtful directing make the oldest tales seem new.

A nonstarter.

In Memento, Nolan and his editor, Dody Dorn, created a new syntax for movies. It's depressing to see Nolan now relying on the same fakery as everyone else.

Batman Begins at last penetrates to the dark and troubled depths of the Batman legend.

Nolan turns Batman Begins into something much closer to Miller's 'Dark Knight' interpretation than the glamorous, slam-bang Hollywood jokefests into which the series had slipped by Batman and Robin time.

For all the hype about exploring Batman's damaged psyche, Nolan and Goyer haven't added much beyond a corny opening in which he falls down a well and is attacked by bats.

Is it too much to ask that the action sequences not be monotonously, narcotizingly dull?

If comic books must be a staple of our movie diet, please let them be as thought-provoking and thrilling as this.

An undeniable return to good form for the enduring comic book hero, an industrial-strength summer-action flick fantasia that manages to capture the excitement of the early Batman films while working in a decidedly darker tone.

Finally, a Batman movie that's actually about Batman.

Batman Begins is for morons.

For all the effort and expense that went into this salvage job on an old, abandoned property, I would have preferred that Batman -- now past 66 years old -- be given his pension and sent on his way.

There is talent and cleverness here, but not much excitement.

It's a wake-up call to the people who keep giving us cute capers about men in tights. It wipes the smirk off the face of the superhero movie.

When you shine too much light, you take away the shadows. And without those, the Dark Knight is just a guy in a rubber suit mugging muggers.