Batman Begins Reviews
Top CriticNolan takes an admirable stab at developing a character-driven drama, only to give in to generic action-movie conventions with a blinding, deafening, explosion-laden finale that could have capped off any number of interchangeable Jerry Bruckheimer flicks.
Batman Begins summons up moments of great eloquence and power. If only its cast of characters was as fully inhabited as its turbulent city.
It's not just the birth of Batman we're seeing in this triumphant interpretation, it's also the dawning of Gotham City's age of greed.
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| Original Score: A
Here's how any great franchise should start: with care, precision and delicately wrought atmosphere.
Without the biff! bang! pow! of pop signifiers, this intelligent, well-made film is too heavy to transport us anywhere but down the dark hole of its good intentions.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
If you love Batman, then Batman Begins will the best Batman movie ever made. On the other hand, if you love Batman movies, Batman Begins may leave you wondering where the Joker went.
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| Original Score: 3/4
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.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The muscular grit of the action sequences is leavened with nicely judged sarky banter.
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.
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| Original Score: A
Apart from the lumbering pacing and embalmed tone, the movie is densely forested with oaken dialogue, wasteful in its casting...and incoherently over-edited in its action sequences.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Batman Begins leaks existential phoniness from the first frame.
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.
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| Original Score: B+
Is it too much to ask that the action sequences not be monotonously, narcotizingly dull?
| Original Score: 2.5/4
A mature take on material often relegated to the kiddie file, and it's simply the latest proof that, when treated properly, comic books are a viable art form for all ages. Bring on the sequel.
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| Original Score: 3/4
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.
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| Original Score: 3/5
If comic books must be a staple of our movie diet, please let them be as thought-provoking and thrilling as this.
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| Original Score: 4/4
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.
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.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Here's a legend sometimes proved true: Sharp writing and thoughtful directing make the oldest tales seem new.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Bale, in his first venture into superhero status, hits just the right balance between Bruce's uncertainty and the intensity of his alter ego. Besides, Caine and Freeman elevate any project in which they appear.
Finally, a Batman movie that's actually about Batman.
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| Original Score: 4/5
A ponderous, deeply unironic psychological portrait with such a pervasive sense of gravitas that it borders on self-importance.
Christopher Nolan has gone back to basics, jettisoning both the silliness of the TV incarnation and the gothic and fetishist elements of the '90s version. This is a hard-core, down-and-gritty origin story.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Say goodbye to 'pow' and 'zowie.' Say hello to a level of raw excitement that at times makes Batman look like a predator for justice.
| Original Score: B+
What makes this Batman so enjoyable is how the director Christopher Nolan arranges familiar genre elements in new, unforeseen ways.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Bruce Wayne's invention of Batman is the story of Batman Begins, and it's an epic one, with a suitably epic cast of A-list actors.
There's just the pleasure of seeing something that's both fantastic to the eye and emotionally dimensional. This is how to make action movies.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Christopher Nolan has loaded the story with enough myth and emotion that it would not be silly to compare it with the samurai tales of Akira Kurosawa.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The earlier Batman movies were charades. With Bale, it's a biopic, filled with nuance, emotion and contradictions.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Maybe, now that this version of the franchise has drained itself of explanatory residue, the next chapter will have more bounce.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
With Christian Bale in the title role, this is a film noir Batman, a brooding, disturbing piece of work that starts slowly but ends up crafting a world that just might haunt your dreams.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The action sequences feel like generic studio product, frantically and confusingly edited, and the lengthy Batmobile chase scene feels like a good opportunity to take the kids to the bat-room.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's all a little disappointing, particularly given the talents involved.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
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.
| Original Score: B
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.
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| Original Score: 4/4
No fan of cult director Christopher Nolan is going to regard this respectable effort as anything but a comedown from 2001's Memento.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
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.
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| Original Score: 3/4
In Batman Begins, Christian Bale gives us the best Bruce Wayne that has ever graced the screen.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's about the birth pains of a superhero, with the emphasis on those pains as much as on superheroism.
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| Original Score: B+
Batman Begins at last penetrates to the dark and troubled depths of the Batman legend.
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| Original Score: 4/4
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.
Nolan's too good for Bat business as usual. His secret for making Batman fly is as basic as black: Keep it real.
| Original Score: 3/4
[Nolan's] effort is not dishonorable, but what it needs, and doesn't have, is a Joker in the deck-some antic human antimatter to give it the giddy lift of perversity that a bunch of impersonal explosions, no matter how well managed, can't supply.
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.
This is the best Batman movie ever by far.
There is talent and cleverness here, but not much excitement.
For Christopher Nolan to turn Batman Begins into such a smart, gritty, brooding, visceral experience is astonishing.
