Movie Review: Batman Begins

I'll be honest, when I first heard there was going to be another Batman movie, I cringed. As a huge fan of the animated series that has aired through-out the 90s and Batman Beyond, I love the whole concept of the Dark Knight. However, after the suitibly dark and mildly creepy Batman movie with Micheal Keaton, they all seemed to become worse than each before. I generally liked each star selected for each bad guy (I mean, Jim Carey was the best Riddler hands down...and Tommy Lee Jones was an awesome two-fact), but the sets became too comic-bookish. The Incredibles was less cartoonish than any of the last Batman movies.

After it was released, I started to hear good things about Batman Begins...and so my interest was peaked. Now that I've watched it, I'm impressed. The movie takes the viewer from events early in Bruce Wayne's life into the birth of batman. The starts the movie of in an interesting manner, because most of these events are relegated to various flashbacks. Instead of focusing on the creation and destruction of one of Batman's many foes, this movie fills up with how Bruce became Batman with more emphasis on character development and a little less on action. This isn't particularly bad...just different.

My main complaint is simply the camera gets too close to any fights, so you can't really tell what's going one. I suppose this is to give the viewer the impression they're in the fight, but it does nothing for attempting to be impressed with the actor's fight scenes. Liam Neeson does well in his role...but it's just close enough to some previous roles that you may begin to think he's a Jedi Master talking about the force instead of anger.

In the end, I give Batman Begins a 4/5. The movie closes well, with a scream for a sequel...or would go directly into the 1988 Batman movie. We'll see what happens, but I enjoyed the movie.