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Practice

Bitter and restive, this incarnation of the Dark Knight has more than dead parents on his mind. Indeed, as Batman Begins begins, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is beset with traumatic memories, from a childhood fall into a bat-swarmed well to the loss of a childhood friend. His brief reverie gives way to the present, that is, his imprisonment in the Chinese boonies. And here he faces yet more potential trauma, in the form of a looming fellow inmate who proclaims, "You're in hell, and I'm the devil." Bruce is not impressed. Oh no, he grimaces, barely, "You're not the devil. You're practice."

It's a decent first line, setting up Bruce's determination and fury, a well as his grim arrogance and even a taut sense of comedy. It also serves as his introduction to martial arts mentor Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson), who observes his bone-cracking throwdown with a squad of this devil's large friends, then invites him to join up with the League of Shadows, following his testing trek up a mountain with a rare blue flower in tow. (The ostensible difficulties of finding this flower are left off screen -- it's all about the manly climbing and lurching about, as Bruce makes his way to the snowy mountaintop.) Once he arrives at the training facility, Bruce learns that his "practice" has barely prepared him.

Here he meets cryptic mystic Ra's Al Ghul (a criminally underused Ken Watanabe), who nods his head to launch a charge on Bruce by League members, a rugged band of mostly anonymous vigilantes resolved to kill every last villain on earth, or at least those inhabiting Gotham City, Bruce's old stomping ground. Bruce, however, is disinclined to burn down places in order to save them. As Christopher Nolan's much-anticipated prequel has it, he's got a humanistic heart beating beneath his angry exterior. And so, following some indeterminate time spent training with Ducard and, Bruce heads back to Gotham and Wayne Manor, by way of a quick call to Alfred (Michael Caine), who arrives within hours with transportation and a change of clothing.

Back home, Bruce sets about his own version of a clean-up mission. And here the camera typically dotes on origin story highlights -- the design of the cowl, the darkness of the cave, the creation of the cape, and the decision on the "image," all important, as it must strike fear into the hearts of bad guys. (That Bruce understands this importance of image is not news; that the film proposes it as a sort of self-manufacture and branding speaks a current knowledge of commercial culture.) Of all these creation moments, the most exhilarating is Bruce's discovery and purchase of the Batmobile, here a frankly awesome futuristic all-terrain military vehicle designed by Wayne Enterprises basement genius, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman).

Bruce names his crusading self Batman in honor of the creatures who so frightened him as a child -- and so you won't forget it, the film repeats this scary trauma image every time Bruce has a bit of a hesitation over what to do next. His essential dilemma has to do with a separation and balance between revenge and justice, an opposition conveniently named by his reappeared childhood friend Rachel, now grown up to embody a combination romantic interest/moral conscience (played by the seriously lackluster Katie Holmes).

Now an earnest Assistant District Attorney in Gotham, Rachel is shocked to learn Bruce's real reason for returning home following his long absence (in China and elsewhere). He's not interested in making a victim's statement at the parole hearing of his parents' shooter Joe Chill (Robert Brake), but to shoot him (an intention thwarted by the fact that someone else gets there first -- apparently courthouse security offers little in the way of metal detection). But even as Bruce seems to think he's asserting that he's no victim, Rachel sees him limited by his past, a function of his own fear, guilt, and sense of impotence. Her chiding, however, only moves Bruce to glower some more, at which point she drops him off in the seedier part of an overwhelmingly seedy city, but not before she articulates her definition of the terms at hand: "Justice is about harmony," she intones, whereas with "revenge, you make yourself feel better."

With the movie's central theme thus reduced to fortune-cookieish concision, Batman emerges full-blown, cape flapping and big music booming. His initial assault on a pack of henchmen working for kingpin Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) is rendered with thrilling smash-up spasticity. The blows and the cuts run simultaneously, dark and hard to read, along with whomping and whooshing sound effects. While Batman takes up crusading, Bruce starts playing playboy, doing his best to squander his philanthropist father's good name, perhaps to distract media attention away from what's really going on below the Mansion, namely, the construction of that Bat-myth.

This construction is the plot here, which means that the seeming plot -- Batman's fight with Falcone, aided by Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy), gets relatively short shrift. Too bad too, because Scarecrow's primary scheme has to do with populating Arkham Asylum with a slew of nutty masterminds, their nastiness enhanced by a weaponized hallucinogen, which he also means to release into and through the Gotham water supply (this is actually a clever scheme, and in no small way alluding to current bio-weapons anxieties). The effects of this drug are rendered in subjective whappy head imagery, not unlike the whappy heads in Jacob's Ladder (another movie about government criminality and conspiracies) -- all blurred, toothy, and darkly nightmarish.

The thematic connection between Lyne and Nolan's visions is perhaps more compelling than the visual effects, for both films presume the loss of official goodness, as institutions and interests have long since slid into so-called corruption. On one hand, the eliding makes vigilantism seem an only answer, but on another, it leaves no choice but "escalation," to more spectacular attacks and more grandiose super-villains, as noted by last "good cop" Lt. James Gordon (Gary Oldman, underplaying to perfection here). As police, legal, corporate and criminal forces all hang together, the film suggests, Batman's scary loner provides one possible answer, flawed and mortal as he may be.

Self-righteous, flagrantly emotional as well as coldly rational, alarmingly tunnel-visioned, Batman brings a sense of mission and strategies of terror -- scaring the evildoers is the best (only?) way to deter their grasping ambitions and their overweening violence. Batman means business, in the equally trendy forms of franchise and vengeance. He feels better when he gets it done, and you're supposed to feel better too. (Unless you align with the cautious, idealistic Rachel, which is hard to do, given her role here.) Batman Begins is a smartly ambiguous and wholly marketable deal. And its strange harshness is at once fitting and harrowing.