Batman Begins (2005)

Let's go back in time a bit. It's 2004. It's been 7 years since George Clooney and Joel Schumacher took Batman, one of the most iconic superheros of all time, and gave him a fluorescent makeover complete with his very own absurdly niche-market credit card. His most worthy opponent had been reduced to a mute, brainless, walking slab of ground chuck in a luchadore mask, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger, the King of The Awesomely Bad One-Liners, was unable to utter a single sentence that didn't physically hurt. But while the pain of Chris O'Donnell whining about wanting a Robin-Signal in the sky has finally begun to fade, still, there is a lingering sadness hanging over nerd culture.

Oh, true - "Spiderman 2" was still being fawned over by pasty comic book geeks everywhere, at least whenever they could spare a moment to stop arguing over important things like if they got Peter Parker's hair parted on the correct side. But for every "Spiderman" movie that didn't make nerds want to bludgeon things to death with their mint-condition Spider-mobile, there were movies like "Daredevil." Movies like "Catwoman." Movies like "The Hulk." And soon would come movies like "The Fantastic Four" and "Superman Returns." Truly, this was a time for some despair.

And beneath it all, that lingering sadness remained. Beneath everything else, hitting harder and cutting deeper than any other betrayal was that one sad, heartbreaking fact: They had done it. They killed Batman.

This paid for the funeral.

Then we start hearing things. They're bringing him back. Instant fear seeped down the pant leg of many a nerd as the 'Nam flashbacks of Alicia Silverstone donning the Batgirl costume rushed back, threatening to drive many to madness. I know that I was one of them, rocking back and forth in the corner of my room in the fetal position as echos of Clooney's fourth-wall desecrating line "This is why Superman works alone" bounced around in my head.

But then we started to hear other things. Things about this guy barely anyone had heard of named Christopher Nolan. The only thing anybody seemed to know about him was that he was "that one guy who made that one movie that went backwards, or something."

Well, I for one knew exactly who he was, and the name of that movie was "Memento." He had also done a movie with Al Pacino and Robin Williams called "Insomnia." I had seen both of those films, so I looked at "Batman Begins" with a new sense of hope, because after seeing those two films, I knew that Nolan was a guy who knew what the hell he was doing. And as more information came out, it became clear that finally, at long last, they were taking Batman seriously again for the first time since 1989.

I just going to come out and say it, "Batman Begins" is the best superhero origin story ever made. Period. Now, some may argue that the first Sam Raimi "Spiderman" was the best. I would say that while it's true that "Spiderman" was a great origin story, I have to give it to "Batman Begins" simply because to me, it made the most sense out of any origin story I'd ever seen. Most of this came from the first part of the film showcasing the often forgotten fact that Batman is, in fact, a ninja.

For all of you blowing a gasket at that, think about it. Bruce Wayne is trained in the mountains by people, who as we plainly see, are ninjas. He employs diversion, mind games, and stealth to take out enemies without being seen. He wears black and stays in the shadows whenever possible. He throws shurikens for crying out loud. Oh, true, he calls himself "The Batman" instead of "The Ninja-man," but if it looks like a ninja, moves like a ninja, and fights like a ninja, odds are it's a ninja.

No, nothing ninja-esque about this dude at all...

What that does is make Bruce Wayne a more realistic and interesting superhero. Let's compare Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne.

Peter Parker is a normal kid. Whether or not he's really super smart depends on the movie you watch (I'm not up on my comics, so I don't know what he's like in those), but for all intents and purposes, he's normal. Then he gets bitten by a radioactive spider and hey presto he has superpowers. These powers are just heaped on him without him really having to work to get them. Oh true, he has to fall off an occasional building before he masters his web shooters, but all of a sudden, he's doing back-flips and kung-fu battling villains like a madman, despite him never learning how to fight. He can just do that now.

Because spiders are natural warriors?

You wouldn't think it, but this dude holds 3 MMA championships.

Bruce Wayne trained his ASS off. There was not a single "power" he has that was given to him. He worked for every single bit of skill that he has, and every cut, every broken bone, every concussion, every single injury he sustained was willingly taken out of his obsession with stopping the crime that took his family away from him. And at the end of the day, he's human. And more than any other superhero, the physical strain that he goes through is clear to see. He's not a superhero, he's just an exceptional man who has no special powers to fall back on when he's in trouble.

For my money, this is a far more interesting character to follow than someone like Peter Parker, or god help me, that goody-goody two shoes Clark Kent. I've just always loved the fact that Batman has to leg sweep a guy once in a while, you know?

"My plan? Well, I was thinking about flying really fast and picking something up. It's all I seem to do."

More than any other "Batman" films, the Nolan series starts off by showing what Bruce Wayne actually went through to become Batman. Every other time it was just the prerequisite "dark alley gunshots" and Mr. and Mrs. Wayne lying on the wet sidewalk in a flashback/dream sequence. In this movie, his struggle seems more poignant because we see the buildup to those struggles, which is something the other films all lacked entirely.

I love Christian Bale as an actor, but out of everything I've seen him in, I think his turn as Batman is going to be what people remember him for, which is a good thing. I liked Michael Keaton as both Bruce and Batman, because he was the only guy to play Bruce Wayne like he was crazy enough to dress like a bat and fight crime. I even thought Val Kilmer was a great Bruce. He just wasn't great under the mask, frankly. But Christian Bale is the first guy who's played a good Bruce Wayne while still looking like he could be Batman physically. The way he carries himself and the way he is crazy ripped leaves little doubt that he could actually do these things. You look at Val Kilmer as Batman and wonder if he's worried about his hair getting messed up under the cowl.

As far as the rest of the cast goes, it's only one cast member away from perfect. Having Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgen Freeman, my unapologetic man-crush Liam Neeson, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, and even frigging Rutger Hauer in "Batman Begins" basically makes it a movie composed of a respectable chunk of my favorite actors. And then there's Katie Holmes. Her performance is tolerable enough I suppose, but when she's on screen with actors like Michael goddamn Caine, it's like watching Homer Simpson boxing Drederik Tatum: the best she can hope for is her corpse still looking vaguely human after he pounds into a meat-flavored pile.

"Now den. Oym gonna 'it ewe wiff dis bat, an' ewer gonna take it. 'Cause oym Muwhyco Caine."

Oh, quick side note, be on the lookout for future royalty on the streets of Gotham. 

Psychotic, inbred future royalty...

If there was a short coming with "Batman Begins," it was probably that I felt that it waffled slightly when it came to the question "Who is the bad guy in this?" Now, this is simply a matter of the movie pulling some twists on us, obviously, but it did feel on occasion that there was no central villain for the good middle hour of the film. And I must say that I was upset that Cillian Murphy's villain, The Scarecrow, was essentially made a non-issue about forty minutes after it appeared that he was the main bad guy. Of course, they work him into the main villain, Ras al-Ghul's plot, but he's really just a pawn in a bigger scheme. And he has what is undoubtedly the least dignified and most unsatisfying send off for a Batman villain that I remember seeing. Getting tasered in the face by Katie Holmes? Really? That's the resolution of that one? Lame.

I also wasn't a big fan of how the effects of Scarecrow's "fear-gas" were implemented. The visions that people are seeing when they are under its effects really don't seem that terrifying. I mean, most of the time, other people are just appearing as having glowing eyes. I suppose when Scarecrow sees Batman while suffering its effects it kind of works, but really all Batman looks like is a drooling gargoyle. Not really that scary. Now, if they were rotting, decaying, grotesque corpses or something, that I can see being scary. But how far could you push that and keep a PG-13 rating? Who knows.

Those little nitpicks aside, I loved "Batman Begins." I had been a fan of Christopher Nolan before, but his rescuing of The Dark Knight earned a spot in my favorite directors file.

And to think, we thought he knocked it out of the park on this one. If we only knew...

THE BOTTOM LINE - This was more of a retrospective than an actual review, I know. This is mostly because honestly, if you haven't seen "Batman Begins" yet, what the hell are you doing? It's one of the most important comic book movies ever, being the beginning of what I would call the best superhero trilogy ever made. Very Highly Recommended.

Hostile Waters (1997)

I love bargain bin movies. Well, sometimes. Sometimes they can bite you square in the ass with a "you get what you paid for, and you paid 49 cents for me" situation, but sometimes you get lucky. I was lucky enough to recently come across a whole bunch of cheap movies at a local game store that also sold previously owned DVDs for a reasonable price. Now, I'm not expecting these to be good, but I had a feeling that they wouldn't hurt me too badly. Two of them happened to be Rutger Hauer films, and two of the others looked to be bootlegs of chop-socky flicks from Hong Kong, as well as "Onichanbara: The Live Action Movie." For those uninformed, that is known in the States as "Samurai Bikini Zombie Squad." And yes, they made a movie. Don't worry, I'll get to it eventually.

I had the urge for some Rutger Hauer manliness this evening, so I popped in what was the most grounded-in-reality of the two, "Hostile Waters," a TV movie HBO and the BBC made in good old 1997. The other was "Crossworlds" which looked like Rutger Hauer meets "Sliders," which honestly sounds amazing, but I was in a Tom Clancy mood. I wanted to see how well HBO could rip off "The Hunt For Red October." Oooo, and it's got Martin Sheen! Neato.

I guess the first thing you'd probably ask is: how well does it rip off "The Hunt For Red October?" The answer is "pretty well for a TV movie with I'm guessing a fifth of the budget." Like most submarine movies, most of the action involves a bunch of sweaty guys standing around in a small room with a bunch of flashing lights as they yell orders into a headset, and every once in a while the stage tilts to the left and everyone throws themselves to that side of the room. You know. Sub movies.

I know that's not giving it quite the credit it deserves but let's not kid ourselves, there are only so many things you can do with a submarine movie, and if you've seen one, you've pretty much seen all of them. Just watch "Das Boot" and you've pretty much seen the epitome of it, and everything else is just kind of a retread of that film in a different time period. "The Hunt For Red October" is probably second on the list just because it made the whole "this thing can blow up the universe" aspect popular.

Truthfully, I would still rather watch this any day.

Back to "Hostile Waters," though. The film is the reportedly true story of an incident in the late 80's when an American sub grazed the Russian sub it was tracking. The Russian sub began having buku problems which ended with such fun things as the nuclear warheads threatening to blow up to the reactor threatening to meltdown. It wasn't a good day aboard K-219.

The film touts the fact that it has an all star cast including not only Hauer and Sheen, but also Max Von Sydow. Truthfully, it's really Hauer's show as Sheen, who plays the American sub commander, isn't in it nearly enough for my liking. Of course this makes sense since the drama is unfolding on the Russian sub, and it really doesn't make much sense to focus on the guy who's only job in the film is to agonize over whether or not to pull the trigger and blow the Russian sub up. Pro-Tip: That would make Russia mad. Yeah, that's good drama, but Hauer has the more interesting and intense of the two stories.

Max Von Sydow is barely in it enough to qualify. He probably filmed his scenes on his lunch break. It's like Donald Sutherland in "Horrible Bosses" or Richard Dreyfus in "Piranha." They're in those movies for like a minute and a half. Or Christopher Lee in Tim Burton's version of "Sleepy Hollow," where his part in the movie is literally done before his name shows up in the opening credits! Von Sydow is in it for a bit longer than that, but it really could have been anyone.

A more notable cameo role that I geeked out over was Dominic Monaghan as one of the Russian sailors. That's right, Meridoc Brandybuck himself is in this movie, and it was actually his first film role. The dude only has like 2 lines, tops, but he's a heavily featured extra. Hell, they give him a lot of screen time for a dude in his first movie, including some emotional closeups. I guess props to the filmmakers for spotting talent.

"If I die, what will happen to me band? Driveshaft, by the way. Maybe you've heard of us?"

Of course, at the end of the day what makes or breaks the movie is going to be Rutger himself. I suppose if you don't like him, it's not going to work for you, but I think he's pretty good. But one can not look at this performance and not compare it to Sean Connery. Both of them are playing Russian sub skippers, both of them are being pursued by Americans, both get in really big trouble which threatens nuclear war, and neither one gave the slightest attempt at an accent of any kind. Now for Sean Connery, it kind of works because he is, in fact, the Supreme Badass of the Multiverse, and like the great Craig Ferguson once said of him, he's not an actor, he's a movie star! Rutger doesn't have that privilege of getting away with that, so it's a bit more noticeable, but by the end, it really doesn't matter. At least he doesn't half ass it with a bad accent. He just doesn't try, which is probably a smarter move.

Even if you're just waiting for Sean to storm in at any moment and yell, "Shun, you call that a mushtash? It looksh like a wee rat with irritable bowelsh!"

"What? Moments lost in time? Tears in rain? Listen, I don't have time for this. Sean Connery is here and he's insulting my facial hair. No, I have no idea how he got on the ship, he's magic or some crap..."

BOTTOM LINE - If you've seen one submarine movie before, particularly "The Hunt For Red October," this will seem very, very familiar territory. However, it's still a decent flick with some pretty good tension going on. Give it a try if you can get it for cheap.