Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins rests snuggly in the giant cavern of disparity created by earlier efforts from Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher.  Begins doesn’t come close to touching Burton’s deliciously surreal takes on the Caped Crusader, but then again, it’s still better than Schumacher’s superhero tales cloaked in colorful Gay Pride floats.  Hardcore Batman fans will probably dig it, but everyone else is likely to be alienated by either the clunky storyline and wide smattering of characters, or the last hour, which devolves into typical summer movie fare (read: noisy car chases, explosions and choppy fight scenes).

Burton dealt briefly with the origins of Batman, but Nolan (Insomnia) and screenwriter David S. Goyer (Blade: Trinity) dive head first into the various mechanisms that drew billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale, The Machinist) into a secret life of keeping the streets of Gotham thug-free.  The first half of Begins hops around between three different periods in Wayne’s life, focusing mostly on his ninja training (!) at the feet of Henri Ducard (Kingdom of Heaven’s Liam Neeson, forever stuck in mentor mode) and Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe, The Last Samurai), whose mysterious organization, we eventually learn, is intent on destroying Gotham.

Wayne doesn’t dig this too much, and makes quick with the destruction before returning to Gotham, where he finds his former metropolis ruled by Carmen Falcone (Tom Wilkinson, Stage Beauty), a drug kingpin with both cops and judges in his back pocket, and a cozy deal with Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy, Cold Mountain), who declares Falcone’s incarcerated “associates” to be mentally disturbed before giving them cushy sentences in his Arkham Asylum.  Wayne must also contend with corruption within his family’s business, now lead by the shady Richard Earle (Rutger Hauer, Sin City), though this does allow our protagonist to cuddle up with tech wizard Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman, Unleashed), who grants Wayne Enterprise’s namesake access to all of “those wonderful toys.”

So far, so good, unless you were hoping to see Bale don the Bat-suit before the 60 minute mark.  Or weren’t already drowning in a sea of peripheral characters (we still haven’t mentioned Alfred, the future Commissioner Gordon, or Wayne’s one-dimensional love interest).  Or, I don’t know – were hoping for something as good as the second installments of Spider-Man or X-Men.  Or even the first installments of Spider-Man or X-Men.  And this is what’s going through your head at the halfway mark, before Begins making less and less sense as it approaches its silly final act, which I’m still not sure I fully understand based on the inconsistencies with Crane’s fear drug alone.

Instead of a larger-than-life villain – like Nicholson’s Joker – Begins opts for a half-dozen lesser bad guys, who are all felled so quickly and easily, Wayne/Batman never once seems to be in real jeopardy (though you can hardly tell from his voice, which makes it sound like he’s undergoing a perpetual colonoscopy).  On the plus side, the filmmakers do a decent job of aging Bale for the different settings, and they manage to make their tale quite bleak and the Scarecrow surprisingly menacing (because what’s so scary about a burlap sack?).  And Gotham’s criminals are really afraid of Batman, with this fear becoming a constant and non-stop theme here, almost to the point of becoming laughably obvious.

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for intense action violence, disturbing images and some thematic elements