This is from empireonline.com
Plot
Billionaire down-and-out Bruce Wayne (Bale), traumatised since the murder of his parents, is recruited by The League Of Shadows,
ninja assassins devoted to eradicating society's ills. Rejecting their methods, he returns to Gotham and embarks on a one-man war
against crime.
Review
As the title suggests, this sets out to be radically different from the series inaugurated by Tim Burton's Batman in 1989 and trashed
by Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin in 1997. Indeed, director Christopher Nolan gets even further than Burton from the camp of the
1960s TV show, to the point where you wonder how cartoonish Bat-foes like the Penguin could ever appear in Nolan's rusty, economically
desperate Gotham City.
Whereas Burton sketched an Art Deco hell and shoved Michael Keaton on screen in a Bat-suit in the first minutes, Nolan puts off the
moment when Christian Bale dons the mask for almost an hour. Influenced by the look and feel of the X-Men films, Batman Begins spends
a lot of time in a world only just removed from reality before getting to the superheroics.The first act finds Wayne in a Chinese prison
and a Himalayan monastery, transforming from bearded brawler to black-clad ninja as he flashes back to a lifetime of
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trauma that - in this version - began even before his parents' deaths, as he falls down
a well and is terrorised by the bats which later inspire his night persona. Burton had Wayne's mom and pop killed by the hoodlum who would
become The Joker, but Nolan reverts to earlier comics and makes the murderer a panicky no-one named Joe Chill, blurring the set-up so young
Bruce and even Wayne Sr. (Linus Roache) must take some blame for the killings.
The Nolan who made Memento and Insomnia is at home with extreme psychological states - this might complete a Three Colours Of Neurosis
trilogy by following memory loss and sleeplessness with phobia. It's certainly a smart move to cast the former Patrick Bateman as a Batman
who always seems about to crack up. Bale even makes the old playboy-idiot act work, suggesting - as Michael Caine's dry Alfred notes - a man
who needs to pretend to have fun because he might accidentally enjoy himself.
Batman maintains a secret identity, but he's recruiting an army for a war - forming alliances with Gordon (Oldman), the only honest cop in
Gotham, and Wayne Enterprises' R&D man Lucius Fox (Freeman), while treating childhood sweetheart/Assistant D. A. Rachel Dawes (Holmes) as
much as an informant as love interest (she takes the role played in comics by Harvey Dent, who becomes the disfigured villain Two-Face,
suggesting a possible career-changing stretch for Holmes if this thread carries through).
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