"But Nolan's film gives us an interesting new twist. After 13 years in the joint, this mugger is up for a parole court hearing, proposing to offer inside information that could convict Gotham's biggest villain Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). It turns into a Jack Ruby-style bloody fiasco; Bruce flees abroad to find himself and brood on who the real bad guys are, and winds up thrown in jail in China where he encounters a mysterious sect of righteous assassins, led by Liam Neeson, who propose to instruct him in the vocation of the masked avenger. This is the movie's big influence: a wholesale borrowing from the new wave of action movies like Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Batman's big credibility gap has always been that he is the superhero without superpowers. Nolan's film imports the concept of Asian martial arts to bolster Batman's credentials. Back home, the young corporate princeling works on his new persona, with the help of his butler and confidant Alfred, amiably played by Michael Caine. As Batman, Bale does look quite creepy, especially close up, his mouth and chin transformed into something bestial - with a growling voice that drops an octave when in character. His batmobile isn't the sleek black convertible of old but a chunkier Humvee-ish ride, more suitable for paranoid urban combat and originally designed for the military by the Wayne group's tech maestro (played by Morgan Freeman). Bale brings to this some of his American Psycho performance, a rich loner compulsively assuming a new identity to purge his self-loathing, and indeed ambiguous loathing of a father who failed to stand up for himself. Certainly, the muddy colours of Nolan's visual palette make everything look appropriately dark - and dark is what so many movies nowadays claim to be, perhaps confusing darkness with factor, however, by casting Cillian Murphy as an unprincipled psychiatrist who specialises depth. (I am tempted to say: you want dark? Try the daylit nightmares of Neil LaBute or Michael Haneke.) Nolan certainly intensifies his own darkness-visible in getting obvious villains off on insanity charges, and is involved in a plot to use a fear-inducing poison gas. Murphy, with his uniquely sinister good looks and sensuous, predatory mouth, is the scariest actor I know."