Comic Book Films

"Val Kilmer — Batman/Bruce Wayne"

"[from TV spot] In a city where evil is everywhere, justice wears a mask."

"[from TV spot] The criminal in question. His accomplice in crime. A woman in danger. A partner in training. A hero in black."

"Courage now, truth always..."

"Newscaster: In local news, Edward Nygma's 3D Box has become the rage of Gotham. Rioting occurred last night at electronic stores which were sold out. There is hardly a home without the NygmaTech Box. Critics have claimed the Box turns Gothamites into zombies, but Edward Ngyma just shrugs: "That's what they said when TV was invented.""

"[discussing Dick with Bruce] Young men with a mind for revenge need little encouragement. They need guidance. You, above all, should know the consequences of the life you choose."

"Broken wings mend in time. One day, Robin will fly again."

"[kicks Two-Face] That was for my mother! [hits Two-Face again] My father! [punches Two-Face] My brother! And this is for me! [headbutts Two-Face]"

"Now...the real game begins!"

"Your entrance was good; his was better. The difference? Showmanship!"

"[Two-Face is about to finish off Bruce Wayne] NO!! Don't kill him. If you kill him...he won't learn nothing."

"Somebody tell the fat lady she's on in five!"

"Riddle me this. Riddle me that. Who's afraid of the big black bat?"

"This is your brain on the Box. This is my brain on the Box! DOES ANYBODY ELSE FEEL LIKE A FRIED EGG?!"

"Has anybody ever told you you have a SERIOUS IMPULSE CONTROL PROBLEM?!?!"

"I simply love what you've done with the place. Heavy Metal meets House and Garden. [laughs] Beautiful! [Takes one of his boxes and puts it on the dark side of the room] It's so dark and gothic and disgustingly decadent [Gestures Spice over with a snarl, then takes a box to the light side]... yet so bright and chipper and conservative! [Urges Sugar over with a whistle] [Back to the dark side; speaking sinisterly] It's so you... [to the light side, speaking operatic] And yet so you! Very few people are both a summer and a winter, but... you pull it off quite nicely."

"[after knocking out Stickley with a kettle] Caffeine'll KILL YA!"

"[before falling to his death] Yes, of course you're right, Bruce. Emotions are always the enemy of true justice...thank you...you've always been a good friend."

"[After Robin saves him so he can be imprisoned] Oh, good boy. Good boy. The Bat has taught you very well to be noble. [pulls out a hidden gun and points it at Robin's face] Stupid, but noble."

"WHY CAN'T YOU JUST DIE?!"

"The Bat's stubborn refusal to expire...IS DRIVING US INSANE!!"

"[After flipping his coin to decide whether to kill someone] Ah, fortune smiles. Another day of wine and roses, or in your case, beer and pizza!"

"One man is born a hero, his brother a coward. Babies starve, politicians grow fat. Holy men are martyred, and junkies grow legion. Why? Why why why why why why? Luck! Blind, stupid, simple, doo-dah, clueless luck!"

"Sharon Stone - Laurel Hedare"

"Lambert Wilson - George Hedare"

"You're just a scared little girl playing dress-up."

"CATch Her In IMAX"

"Halle Berry - Patience Phillips/Catwoman"

"Benjamin Bratt - Tom Lone"

"Remember how stiff Batman was in those other films? Guess what -- he can finally move his neck! The battles in Batman Begins are frenetic, fast and almost impossible to see clearly"

"Most of the Batman comics offer little true motivation for Bruce becoming Batman. They say, merely, that he witnessed his parents murder and swore to avenge them by cleaning up Gotham. Batman Begins takes this further. It gives a real sense of who Bruce Wayne is and why he must fight criminals. Further, it shows the moment when Bruce gains understanding that he cannot fight crime just as a man, that he must become a symbol, a myth, a legend."

"But neither Nolan nor, unfortunately, the usually superb Christian Bale seems to recognize that darkness takes on many shades and colors: "Batman Begins" is a dull monotone of heavily theatrical, and yet wholly unmoving, angst. Nolan obviously didn't want his picture to be too cartoony, and that's a good impulse. But "Batman Begins" needs much more energy and kinetic flow -- less dolor and more dolomite. Bale can't seem to find an anchor for the character of Bruce Wayne; at times he's mildly affecting, but he can't locate that elusive hairline at which a character's self-absorption becomes engaging for an audience. His Wayne is so deep inside himself we can barely bring ourselves to care about him. (Bale made me long for Michael Keaton's first appearance, in particular, as Batman -- a performance that seemed breezily neurotic on the surface but actually cut to the heart of existential dread.) There's another problem with "Batman Begins": Batman's stuff has no soul. His mask, with its alert, pointed ears, does manage to give Bale a somber grace from some angles. But Bale (unlike Keaton) has trouble connecting from beneath it -- it wears him instead of the other way around. In a movie whose production design is both massively ambitious and uninspired, the Batmobile is one of the biggest bummers of all: It's like a squat bug covered with clumsy square scales, a dismally unromantic vehicle that looks wholly unsuited for parallel-parking practice, let alone flying through the streets of Gotham. And as hard as Nolan tried to make something other than a typical comic-book movie (although anyone who keeps an eye on comic-book movies realize there's no such thing), the script, by David S. Goyer, works at cross-purposes. As the movie grinds dully toward the finish line, Neeson announces, with drawing-room enunciation, "Now if you'll excuse me, I have a city to destroy." And Tom Wilkinson, who seems to have wandered in from another movie with his cigar-chomping performance as a mob boss, actually says at one point, "Don't burden yourself with the secrets of scary people." In the midst of all this, Gary Oldman gives a finely tuned performance as not-yet-commissioner James Gordon: We see intelligence and honor in his blinking, nearsighted eyes and his twitchy mustache. In a movie that aspires to emotional complexity and comes up empty -- even the action sequences are cluttered and confusingly shot -- he hits the notes right. Playing a character and not a psychological case study, he's one of the few actors here who's unburdened by the secrets of scary people."

"Forget that guy who can't remember what happened to him five minutes ago: Nolan wants to make sure we understand that this deeply gloomy Dark Knight is really messed up. As a filmmaker Nolan has made a name for himself as a purveyor of faux-Hitchcockian gloomy cleverness ("Memento,""Insomnia"), and he has meticulously designed "Batman Begins" to be the feel-bad movie of the summer. And yet "Batman Begins," its dim lighting and relentless fixation on childhood trauma aside, doesn't make us feel quite bad enough. In fact, it makes us feel virtually nothing at all, except maybe a shuddering, reluctant nostalgia for Joel Schumacher. Schumacher's two "Batman" pictures may have been wretched, but at least they didn't mistake oppressiveness for emotional depth. "Batman Begins" leaks existential phoniness from the first frame. Young Wayne -- remember, his Batman alter ego isn't even yet a wriggly tadpole in his completely screwed-up mind -- has traveled the world attempting to understand the criminal mind. He has been falsely arrested and thrown into a tastefully sepia-toned Asian hellhole. Suddenly, a mysterious stranger appears in his cell: It's Liam Neeson, with a list of questions about his sex life. Actually, no -- Neeson's character is Henri Ducard, and he's the associate of a mysterious baldy named Ra's Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). They have a plan for Wayne, luring him into their nefarious scheme by promising that if he goes along with them, he will find the spiritual answers he seeks."

"What this incarnation of Batman lacks is theatricality, a sense of showmanship to put over the new approach. Although little jokes and quips are gradually introduced, only slowly does Nolan dare to begin having any fun with the material, and even then far too cautiously. It’s not that the film is prosaic, but it is terribly sober, afraid to make grand gestures and build to major payoffs. It’s as if, out of a desire to appear smart and not to pander to the large public destined to see the picture, Nolan restrained himself from providing moments that might prove too audience pleasing. As opposed to the highly designed Gotham City of the Tim Burton pictures, this one features cityscapes that recognizably belong to the real Chicago, with a fictional monorail system added in. Nor is there anything fetishistic about the Batman costume, which is plain and functional."

"Although shot in Iceland amidst spectacular terrain that recalls the Alaskan setting of “Insomnia,” this long instructional section is filled with philosophical gobbledygook about developing strength by facing your deepest fears, methods of focusing anger and vengefulness, and how “you must journey inwards.” Some of this is delivered while Ducard and Bruce face off with large swords on a frozen lake, and one must be forgiven for imagining that what’s onscreen are outtakes from “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace,” with Neeson’s Jedi knight teaching Obi-Wan Kenobi dueling techniques. It doesn’t stop there, however, as “The Last Samurai” is invoked with the entrance of Ken Watanabe as the charismatic leader of a vigilante ninja org called the League of Shadows. In the end, Bruce proves himself a worthy student, returning home to take on the rampant corruption in Gotham (or is it Sin City?). Half the city is in the pocket of gangster Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). Others up to no good are Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), a young psychiatrist who leads a double life as the sinister Scarecrow, and Earle (Rutger Hauer), who has taken charge of the Wayne family industries."

"The buildup is steadily engrossing. That’s because Nolan keeps the emphasis on character, not gadgets. Gotham looks lived in, not art-directed. And Bale, calling on our movie memories of him as a wounded child (Empire of the Sun) and an adult menace (American Psycho), creates a vulnerable hero of flesh, blood and haunted fire."

"Shake off those cobwebs. There’s a new Batman in town, and he’s younger, fiercer and klutzier than before. What do you want from a rookie? The Caped Crusader that Christian Bale plays so potently in Batman Begins is still working out the kinks. He nearly gives himself a wedgie scaling a building in a self-designed Batsuit that weighs a stylish ton. Director Christopher Nolan, who wrote the script with David Goyer, shows us a Batman caught in the act of inventing himself. Nolan is caught, too, in the act of deconstructing the Batman myth while still delivering the dazzle to justify a $150 million budget. It’s schizo entertainment. But credit Nolan for trying to do the impossible in a summer epic: take us somewhere we haven’t been before. This stripped-down prequel grounds the story in reality. If Tim Burton lifted the DC Comics franchise to gothic splendor and Joel Schumacher buried it in campy overkill (a Batsuit with nipples), then Nolan — the mind-teasing whiz behind Memento and Insomnia — gets credit for resurrecting Batman as Bruce Wayne, a screwed-up rich kid with no clue about how to avenge the murders of his parents. Batman Begins answers a long-standing question about Bruce the tycoon playboy — a Paris Hilton with balls as previously played by Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer and George Clooney — by showing us what he was doing before he put on his Bat drag, accessorized with lethal toys and learned to kill like a vigilante."

"… And it’s about time. Christopher Nolan’s vision of Bob Kane’s seminal hero returns the character to the stripped-down 1939 proto-noir of Detective Comics No. 39, flaying away all but the name and the cowl from the previous big-budget outings by Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher. This is as close to the Depression-era Bat Man as films have yet ventured, and although Nolan’s Gotham isn’t sporting flivvers and tommy guns – to judge by the art direction, the film takes place in the sort of retro-futuristic metropolis reserved especially for Good, Evil, and assorted Minions – Batman Begins has the denuded color palette of a chiaro-sclerotic nightmare."

"And only then does Batman find his wings, and his mission. That Bruce’s parents were killed before his eyes, and that the heir to the Wayne fortune would be nowhere without his butler, Alfred, even the greenest newbie to the hagiography knows. But knowing doesn’t pack the same pleasurable jolt as seeing primly smoldering Christian Bale’s Batman No. 4 play so comfortably against expansively proper Michael Caine’s Alfred (taking over for Michael Gough as if to the manor born) and watching the two devise the very first Batsuit. Any familiarity with Commissioner Gordon and his place as one overmatched good cop is only rewarded by the participation of Gary Oldman as the younger Detective Gordon. Simpatico Wayne Enterprises inventor Lucius Fox contributes his mechanical expertise (handy when it comes to Batmobiles) and cool to the proceedings in the person of Morgan Freeman. Katie Holmes provides obligatory, chaste romantic interest — superheroes are notoriously dull boyfriends, if you ask me — as Bruce’s childhood sweetheart? turned?incorruptible DA. It’s not just the birth of Batman we’re seeing here, it’s also the dawning of Gotham City’s age of corporate greed (Rutger Hauer plays a ruthless CEO), unchecked corruption (Tom Wilkinson swings by as a crime boss), and the insidious misuse of the mentally ill by those appointed to their care (Cillian Murphy is one great creep as psycho psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Crane). In Batman Begins, as Nolan tells it, Gotham is poised somewhere between the Jazz Age and the Space Age, a vertiginous time warp where only a risk-taking artist can navigate. Nolan ought to get back there soon and tell us what happens next."

"Christian Bale is persuasively melancholy but less gloomily brooding than Michael Keaton, a sturdier figure than George Clooney and Val Kilmer, and more likable than any of them. He doesn't manage his character's playboy persona as easily as Leslie Howard does in The Scarlet Pimpernel or Pimpernel Smith, but that may be part of the joke."

"As Kane tells it, the pre-teen Bruce is out at night (circa 1924) with his parents when an armed mugger kills both of them. The orphaned lad, his hands clasped in prayer, his bedroom illuminated by a single candle, swears 'to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals'. He 'becomes a master scientist' and 'trains his body to physical perfection' and, because 'criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot', chooses to become 'a creature of the night, black, terrible... a bat... the Batman'. From these two garishly printed pages, Nolan and Goyer have fashioned a whole movie. To a narrative that itself draws on a tradition of avenger heroes in foppish disguise stemming from Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel, they have added elements from sources ancient and modern, among them Fritz Lang's expressionist thrillers, Da Vinci Code conspiracies, kung fu flicks and Bond movies."

"Alfred has always been an important character in the Batman universe, but here Michael Caine elevates the dedicated butler to a new level. He is Bruce Wayne and Batman's foremost confidant. He understands why Wayne has become Batman and he helps him to create and initiate his vision. Caine is terrific in the part, undoubtedly the best choice one could imagine. Lucius Fox, who was a slightly different character in the comics, also becomes an integral part of Wayne's crusade. Now we can understand where Batman gets all his wonderful toys and how he learned to put them to their appropriate uses. Gary Oldman is another great choice as James Gordon. This is an early incarnation of the character, before he became commissioner. The character is played very differently from prior visions of Gordon. Here he is a quiet, dedicated cop, one of the few legit men left in a town rife with corruption. Oldman is excellent, and Gordon and Batman have a very nice connection that will serve future films well."

"This is the Batman film you've been waiting for. Batman's evolution into the fabled crime fighter is carefully constructed from the first piece of the puzzle to the chiseled and fierce ultimate evolution. Each part of the process is chronicled with astute precision. Nolan actually finds a way to set-up and explain why a guy runs around in a bat suit. He explains every nuance of the character, from why he chooses the bat as his symbol to why he dons a cape to why he uses the weapons he uses. Nolan leaves no stone unturned. During one sequence, the Batmobile jumps from cityscape rooftop to rooftop. It occurred to me watching this, how exactly does he know that he won't crash through the roofs of these buildings? On the second viewing, however, I noticed something. They thought of that too! Batman has a GPS-like navigation system that gives him info on the rooftops before he topples onto them. By the end of the film, you can try to pick it apart all you want, but you will find that Nolan has covered his bases extremely well, explaining each and every aspect of the Batman arsenal."

"Q: What was your inspiration for the look of Gotham City?"

"Q: This film seems to deal a lot with the underlying issues of what makes Bruce Wayne become Batman. How much of his anger is really under control by the end of this film?"

""Batman Begins" lives up to its title, concentrating mainly on the hero's pre-history. He's trained like a Ninja by a great teacher (Liam Neeson). Later, in a crime-ridden, economically depressed Gotham City, he encounters none of the familiar villains, such as the Joker, the Riddler or Catwoman. They're in the future. The villains who turn up in this early era are normal in appearance, at least by "Batman" standards. Tom Wilkinson plays an Italian mob boss, and he's like any other mob boss, full of threats and resentment, while Cillian Murphy is a perverse psychiatrist, on the mob payroll. On the side of good is Gary Oldman, as a gruff, honest cop, and an assistant D.A. played by Katie Holmes, who, alone among the actors, doesn't quite seem comfortable in her role."

"Bale is the first Batman since Michael Keaton to bring a skewed and somewhat vulnerable sensibility into the psychological equation. Bruce's ultimate decision to become the caped crusader is presented here as a neurotic person's way of channeling his neurosis toward a positive end. Since he knows he'll never stop obsessing about crime -- even his stint in the Asian prison was by way of researching the criminal mind -- he might as well do something positive with his obsession. Keaton suggested these qualities and motivations, as well, but what Bale has that Keaton didn't is a physicality that also makes sense of all the action hero elements. In an early scene, Bruce Wayne beats up a half dozen guys in a prison yard. In terms of direction, it's one of the worst scenes: Nolan, as if uncomfortable shooting a conventional action number, relies on the modern cliches of constant intercutting and of filming so close to the action that it's impossible to see what's going on. But the sequence nonetheless demonstrates that Bale, the most cerebral Bruce Wayne since Keaton, is the most lithe to date. He's physically loose and graceful and looks like what Bruce Wayne pretends to be, a handsome playboy."

"There's some brilliant psychology at work in Batman Begins. The way Goyer and Nolan have crafted this tale, it becomes clear that there is no other possible path for Bruce Wayne other than as Batman. It's not just a conceit that he's going to wear a suit, you will actually understand why he must. Sure, it's not a 100% perfect and literal translation of the comic, but it doesn't have to be. Again, this is not a comic-book movie, just a movie that happens to be based on a comic book. Oh, and it's great."

"The main piece of advice from just about everyone who saw Joel Schumacher's terrible take on the Dark Knight in Batman & Robin was to focus on a single villain. Nolan has ignored this advice. He focuses on no villains -- the focus is all on Batman. However, there are more villains in Batman Begins than any Batman film since the camp '60s flick. Yet it works, because this is a story about The Batman and none of the villains comes close to overshadowing the bat."

"Ken Watanabe – Ra's al Ghul decoy"