The best movie take on the Batman origin so far, though the competition is weak and this is maybe half as good as Frank Miller’s Year One from the comics. The innovation here is that it seasons the story with mild Asian flavors. Call it a Hollywood-Asian fusion dish, a cheeseburger with a dash of hoisin sauce.
We first see Bruce Wayne when he’s a dropout from society so he can build character in an eastern Third World prison camp. From there, he takes up hardcore ninja training with a terrorist sect led by a frosty Liam Neeson, who’s the kind of guy who likes to drop philosophy while he kicks you in the face. When Wayne gets himself back to the city, it’s just in time to try out his new skills on The Scarecrow, a crooked psychiatric doctor who’s part of a plot to bring down Gotham City with a dangerous hallucinogen.
It’s genre filmmaking that’s clever, kinetic and shined up to a glisten. It’s slick as hell, so slick that it can be distancing. Its themes click together so neatly, with tidy foreshadowing and spotless rivers of subtext, that it’s soulless. For example, director Christopher Nolan and writer David S. Goyer are fond of scenes in which a character spouts off an aphorism that later gets repeated by a different character and in a different context to achieve some heavy turning point. You can see some of these moments of poignancy coming from a mile away and the mostly charmless cast (the last time Batman/Bruce Wayne was a magnetic character on film was Adam West—in the new movies, he’s always a stiff who needs a flamboyant villain to liven things up) can’t distract us from the technique. However, if you’re looking for soul, a nine-figure budgeted Batman movie with a property to protect and a franchise to nurture, isn’t the place to go. If you want an entertaining action flick though, this will do.