Movie Review: Tooth Fairy

Tooth Fairy (2010) 

Directed by Michael Lembeck

Written by Babaloo Mandel, Lowell Ganz, Joshua Sternin, Jennifer Ventimilia, Randy Mayhem Singer

Starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Ashley Judd, Julie Andrews 

Release Date January 22nd, 2010 

Published January 21st, 2010

Dwayne Johnson's unique, to say the least, career path from professional wrestling to honest to goodness movie star is relatively improbable on the surface. On closer inspection however there is a good deal of calculation to how the man once known as The Rock; OK he's still more or less known as The Rock, has crafted his movie stardom.

A balance of high concept comedy and low weight action pics that always play to the strengths of the handsome, hard bodied Johnson make for the perfect mix to make a guy a star in relatively quick succession. “Tooth Fairy” fits perfectly in The Rock's canon. This high concept comedy plays to his strong ability to poke fun at himself while leaving just enough room to display his physicality.

The Rock stars in “Tooth Fairy” as Derek 'The Tooth Fairy' Thompson a hockey thug known for knocking opponent’s teeth out. Derek is beginning to near the end of his career as a new young superstar is quick to point out early in the film. In Derek's personal life he has even more trouble on his hands. Things are good with his girlfriend Carly (Ashley Judd) but when he almost tells Carly's daughter that there is no tooth fairy, of the mythic kind, Carly is ticked.

Someone else is even more cheesed off and that is the head of the real tooth fairy operation. Yes, the tooth fairy is real and it turns out it is run like a tooth collecting corporation by Lily (Julie Andrews). When she hears of Derek's attempted myth killing she summons him to tooth fairy headquarters for punishment and while Derek thinks he is having a psychotic break, the reality is he is being made a tooth fairy until he learns the value of childish myths.

”Tooth Fairy” is a dopey, high concept, family comedy that aspires to be nothing more. As directed by mainstream film carpenter Michael Lembeck the film is assembled from recycled materials, hammered into place with thudding, groaning laughs and smoothed over with soporific clichés about families, acceptance and growing up.

If there is any reason to see “Tooth Fairy” it is the appeal of Dwayne Johnson. While this is not The Rock at his best, the guy has enough star power and charisma to carry off even the cheesiest of cheeseball gags. Dressed in a tutu or in hockey gear, Johnson has the exceptional ability to make himself the subject of the joke without losing his cool. It's a deftness that only those with real star power can pull off.

I can't give “Tooth Fairy” a forceful recommendation; the film is far too mindless for an audience with discerning standards. But, for those in the mood for mindless or for kids who don't yet know any better, you could do worse than the dippy simulacrum that is “Tooth Fairy.”

Movie Review: Fighting With My Family

Fighting with My Family (2019) 

Directed by Stephen Merchant

Written by Stephen Merchant 

Starring Florence Pugh, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Lena Headey, Nick Frost, Jack Lowden

Release Date February 14th, 2019 

Published February 13th, 2019 

As a longtime fan of the WWE I have known Saraya Knight from her earliest days in wrestling’s big leagues. I saw her win the very first NXT Women’s Championship. I watched live when she debuted on Monday Night Raw and won what was then called the WWE Divas Championship. I was also there when injuries and scandal nearly ended her career. Finally, I was there when she broke her neck and was forced to retire at the far too young age of 25. 

Saraya ‘Paige’ Knight has lived multitudes in her 26 years beginning her wrestling career at age 12 in Norwich, England, working for her mother and father’s very own promotion, WAW. As the story goes in real life and in the new movie on Paige’s life, Fighting with My Family, she never wanted to wrestle as a kid, that was her brother Zak’s thing. Once in the ring however, things changed and she fell in love with the business and began regularly wrestling against her mother, a successful wrestler in England for many years. 

Florence Pugh portrays Paige in Fighting with My Family. We watch as she wrestles against her parents all the while she and her brother Zac (Jack Lowdon) dream of getting a call from the WWE. That call comes when Paige is a mere 18 years old. Paige and Zac are invited to a WWE tryout while the WWE is in London in 2012. A trainer played by Vince Vaughn as an amalgam of many of WWE’s trainers over the years, named in the movie as Hutch Morgan, decides that only Paige has what it takes to go on to WWE’s Developmental system. 

This drives a wedge between Paige and Zac who had always been very close until this happened. Nevertheless, Paige accepts the chance to join the WWE and move away from her family to Florida where the fish out of water portion of the movie begins. Paige is not the prototypical WWE Diva. She’s up against models and athletes who didn’t grow up in the industry but were brought into it, the movie implies briefly, because of their looks. 

Part of Paige’s journey, surprisingly, is coming to respect the leggy blondes who are initially her antagonists. This is a welcome inversion of the classic trope. Our outsider hero has a journey here that is not as straightforward and heroic as it would initially seem. Fighting with My Family was directed by actor-comedian and writer Stephen Merchant, a rather brilliant comic mind who does well tapping both his comic and dramatic skills in Fighting with My Family. 

Fighting with My Family is not a serious movie by any stretch but it is grounded in a way that allows for the broad humor of wrestling to stand out against the mundane regular world. The juxtaposition between the broad and strange world of professional wrestling and the regular world outside of wrestling plays well for the most part, aside from characters played by the director himself and Julia Davis who play stock characters, whitebred outsiders who look down on the low culture of wrestling.

There is plenty to enjoy about Fighting with My Family including the wonderful supporting performances of Nick Frost and Lena Headey as Paige’s parents. These are wonderful actors playing wonderful characters. Frost and Headey appear to bring lifetimes to these two characters that we never see and yet they feel real and lived in. Their chemistry is remarkable, they are all in on the romance, the wrestling and the family. 

Florence Pugh is solid as Paige, though she lacks her swagger and lithe physique. As written, Paige is not the character we know from the WWE. Pugh plays the behind the scenes Paige as a shrinking violet, a homesick and cowed young woman, completely opposite of the wild child, charismatic, divas champion we would come to know and cheer for. There is a stock quality to the story of Paige learning to find herself, find her voice and her confidence. I don’t doubt that the real Paige went on that journey, but this is unquestionably the sanitized, safe for work take on that journey. 

Wrestling fans will undoubtedly recognize how compressed the timeline of Paige’s career is. In real life, Paige wrestled in America before her WWE debut in a company called Shimmer. She also was an overachiever in WWE Developmental where she won over the company brass enough to be picked to win the very first NXT Women’s Championship, months before her post-Wrestlemania 30 Monday Night Raw debut which is the culmination of Fighting with My Family. 

The film fails to mention that Paige was the NXT Women’s Champion when she she debuted on Monday Night Raw and many of the fans in attendance that night were fully aware of who she was when she went to the ring that night against Diva’s Champion A.J Lee, portrayed in the movie by current WWE superstar, Zelina Vega. The makers of Fighting with My Family would have you believe that she was some unknown wrestler getting a shot out of the blue. Then again, the movie would have you believe that Vince McMahon doesn’t exist and pull every string in the company or that a wrestler would make it to Monday Night Raw without seeing Vince first. 

An interesting thing about Paige is that her life after the events of this movie is way more interesting than her rise to fame. From the place where Fighting with My Family ends to today, Paige has gone through career threatening injuries, a sex tape scandal, a reportedly abusive relationship with a fellow wrestler, drug suspensions and eventually, a career ending injury to her neck that led to her having to find a whole new place in the wrestling world. 

That, however, is not a movie that Paige or the WWE would want to make. That’s a complex journey that has fewer of the warm fuzzy moments that Fighting with My Family is built around. That’s a gritty movie with much more humanity and frailty than the mythic, sweet and funny journey of self discovery that is Fighting with My Family. You can’t slap a PG 13 on that movie and mass market it to an audience of young wrestling fans. 

That said, there is nothing fundamentally wrong with not making that movie and instead making Fighting with My Family. Indeed, Fighting with My Family is a perfectly acceptable, if somewhat bland comedy and biopic. The supporting cast is wonderfully colorful and the world of WWE, though it is completely whitewashed, has a fun, mythic quality to it that, as a wrestling fan, I find entertaining. It’s the WWE of Vince McMahon’s fantasy world. 

By the way, for those wondering about Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s role in Fighting with My Family, much of what you see in the movie really happened. It was The Rock who informed Paige that she was going to be debuting on Monday Night Raw, a scene of wonderful comedy in the movie. There are some fudges in the timeline of Paige’s life in WWE and Developmental WWE but that scene really happened in a form similar to how it plays in the movie.

Movie Review: Doom

Doom (2005) 

Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak 

Written by David Callaham, Wesley Strick 

Starring Karl Urban, Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Rosamund Pike 

Release Date October 21st, 2005 

Published October 22nd, 2005 

I am a huge fan of The Rock. The guy is charismatic, he's cool, he's big and surprisingly funny. That talent was on display in both of his previous roles in the action movies The Rundown and Walking Tall. So what happened to Doom?  Director Andrzej Bartkowiak somehow manages to strip The Rock of his charisma, his humor and any of his other appealing qualities for this human vs. aliens video game retread. Doom had little going for it when it was conceived. Take away the only really appealing element it had in Dwayne Johnson and you have one of the worst films of the year.

On Mars a futuristic research facility has sent out a distress signal of unknown origin. Scientists and archaeologists have disappeared and no one in the facility seems to know why. Enter the Sarge (Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson) and his team of marine mercenaries. Sent to mars to find the missing scientists and help the corporation recover proprietary data, they soon find themselves up against an enemy that may or may not be human.

Hey wait... isn't that the plot for Resident Evil 2? Remove the trip to outer space and toss in Milla Jovovich in some skimpy ass-kicking outfit and you have essentially the same movie. There are even zombies in Doom and possibly, this point was not all that clear, a virus.

Funny thing, there were no zombies at all in the video game on which Doom is based. Of course there weren't any characters in the game either. Instead of The Sarge or Grimm (Karl Urban) or Destroyer (Deobia Oeparai) or the Kid (Al Weaver) you had the first person point of view of a gun that you used to blast alien monsters.

Creative license, I'm sure, was necessary for adapting Doom to the big screen but this departure is rather extreme and made worse by the fact that it's a near complete rip off of another bad video game adaptation. It's bad enough Hollywood studios cannot resist making video games into movies but do they have to make them knockoffs of other video game movies? UGH! 

We might have predicted the kind of disaster that is Doom considering the director. Polish born director Andrzej Bartkowiak, has the kind of resume that only Uwe Boll could envy. Bartkowiak directed two atrocious Jet Li flicks, Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 The Grave and, most egregiously, he brought Steven Seagal's Exit Wounds to the big screen, a cinematic nightmare of incalculable proportions.

Consider ourselves lucky Bartkowiak did not include Mr. Seagal in Doom. The combination of this already bad idea with Seagal might have caused time and space to collapse upon itself in a cosmic gag reflex hurling us all into the ether. Sorry, I'm just saying maybe things could have been worse.

In a nod to gamers Doom retains the first person shooting scenario that is one of the games trademarks. Unfortunately, once we enter the first person mode, which happens for much of the last 20 minutes of the film, watching Doom becomes very much like watching someone else play a videogame and knowing you don't ever get a turn.

The one thing the film had going for it was The Rock. Sadly, cast as taciturn, humorless pseudo cyborg killing machine The Rock loses every last bit of the personality that made him a star. The action genre that The Rock has quickly risen to dominate, in terms of the classic one man against the world Stallone-Schwarzenegger-Van Damme action genre and not the genre as a whole, is built on physicality and personality. Removed from that mold Rock is just another beefcake behemoth with a gun.

Walking Tall was an old school action flick that played to the strengths of Rock's personality while being just different enough from the old school to seem fresh and fun. The Rundown is an out and out buddy comedy that really allowed Rock to cut loose with that fresh charismatic smile and surly but exciting demeanor that I had hoped would become his trademark. Doom is a major step backward for the man once known in the world of professional wrestling as 'the most electrifying man in sports entertainment'.

Just who is the audience for Doom? Teenage boys who loved the videogame might find something to enjoy. But even the least discerning teenage male must have his limit. Doom is an abysmal mess of genre knockoffs and an outright theft of another movies plot and action. And the movie it steals from, Resident Evil 2, isn't very good either so you can imagine how bad a knockoff would be. 

Throw another hack director into the movie marketplace. Andrzej Bartkowiak joins Uwe Boll and the king of all hacks Paul W.S Anderson in the ranks of directors dragging the standards of Hollywood filmmaking to new lows. Where is the justice? Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and other auteurs struggle to find financing for their work, often having to leave the country as Allen did for his latest film Match Point, to find the funding to make one small picture.

Hacks on the other hand are finding ever growing budgets and clout. I know Hollywood is a business but that does not make such practices right. Watch Doom and tell me you disagree.

Movie Review: Crank

Crank (2006) 

Directed by Neveldine and Taylor

Written by Neveldine and Taylor

Starring Jason Statham, Amy Smart, Dwight Yoakam, Erfren Ramirez 

Release Date September 1st, 2006 

Published August 31st, 2006

Jason Statham is right up there with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in the competition to replace the old guard action hero's; Stallone, Van Damme and Schwarznegger. With his two Transporter flicks; Statham established his badass credentials. All that Statham lacks is the easy charisma and sense of humor that The Rock is gifted with. In his latest flick Crank, Statham delivers yet another badass performance but the highly adrenalized Crank also exposes Statham's weaknesses as much as his strengths.

Hitman Chev Chelios (Statham) is having a truly awful morning. He has awakened from one nightmare into another as he finds that he has been killed in his sleep. A rival hitman, Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo), has dosed Chev with a poison called the Beijing cocktail. This poison will slowly snake through Chev's system until it shuts down his heart.

According to his doctor (Dwight Yoakam); Chev has maybe an hour to live unless he can keep his heart rate very high. What Chev needs are massive amounts of adrenaline in whatever way he can get it. Dying a slow death either way; Chev vows to stay alive long enough to say goodbye to his clueless girlfriend Eve (Amy Smart) and to kill Verona and all of his henchman.

Written and directed by the team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, Crank is pure trash, B picture exploitation. Reminiscent of a pair of 2006 chase pictures with similarly lowbrow ambition, Tyrese's Waist Deep and Paul Walker's Running Scared, Crank gets a running start and pauses only for tacky sex scenes and overblown violence.

Crank sets itself apart from the others with a pair of humiliating sex scenes that take the career of poor Amy Smart an flush it down the B movie toilet. In the first of two scenes Smart is raped on the streets of L.A's Chinatown. I say raped, the scene begins as a rape but to make the scene more mortifying she begins to enjoy and participate willingly. Later as Chev's heart begins to slow during a chase scene, Smart's character performs oral sex while Statham drives and shoots bad guys.

Smart is not the only woman treated with little regard in Crank, merely the best known. All other women seen in Crank are dressed in next to nothing and placed in plastic cubes where they are ogled by bad guys. The film also takes time to rip gays and make stereotypical use of its few African American characters. Neveldine and Talyor, I'm sure, would say they are merely being politically incorrect, tweaking the conventions of the masses and other such justifications. That would be interesting if it served a metaphoric purpose; but Crank is just a violent, exploitation chase picture, it lacks the depth to defend its anti-PC attitude.

There is no denying the badass appeal of star Jason Statham. With his bullet shaped head and intense gaze, he is beyond intimidating. Unfortunately, when forced to get to the core of a character -beyond the act of simply killing a man- he is an empty vessel. He is all physicality and no mentality. Statham in Crank is an unstoppable killing machine who takes on an occasional bit of black humor and wit but mostly is just a machine pushed by the plot toward his next violent encounter.

Crank has a visceral power to it that comes from it's propellant plot. That power however, is dissipated by the directors need to be shocking and crude. The two high speed sex scenes in Crank are gratuitous and though the plot tries to makes them seem necessary that does not change their exploitative nature. Watching Amy Smart in these scenes should be titillating; she is a very attractive woman. Rather than titillating however, I felt nothing but pity for Smart who is made to look like an even less willing version of Chloe Sevigny in The Brown Bunny.

Is Jason Statham the next great action hero? The box office will determine that. Myself? I'll take The Rock whose combination of physicality and humor is the perfect combination of action hero violence and wit. Statham is not unappealing; he simply lacks range. Watching Crank you can barely make out any differences between Chev Chelios and the character Statham played in two The Transporter movies. 

Movie Review 12 Rounds

12 Rounds (2009) 

Directed by Renny Harlin

Written by Daniel Kunka 

Starring John Cena, Aiden Gillen, Ashley Scott, Steve Harris, Brian J. White 

Release Date March 27th, 2009 

Published March 27th, 2009 

There is something to say about a movie as energetic and confident as 12 Rounds. Sure, the movie is by few standards a good movie. The plotting is laughable, the performances are wooden, and the screenplay may have been assembled by monkey's with blenders, but the action is kinetic and attention grabbing. Most interestingly, the star is professional wrestling star John Cena, arguably one of the biggest stars on television at the moment. 

WWE superstar John Cena is the star of 12 Rounds as Danny Fischer, a New Orleans police officer about to stumble on a career making bust. He happens to be in the right place at the right moment to bust an international arms dealer, and all around dirt bag named Miles Jackson (Aiden Gillen). Unfortunately, during the bust Jackson's beloved gal Friday is accidentally killed and the baddie vows revenge on Danny.

One year later, Danny and his partner Hank (Brian White) have made detectives thanks to their big bust but they aren't prepared when Miles escapes from federal custody. Soon after his escape, Mile has kidnapped Danny's beloved girlfriend, Molly (Ashley Scott), and has crafted an elaborate series of challenges for Danny to overcome in order to win her safe return. You could say he has 12 Rounds in this fight in order to save his beloved from a cackling mad man bent on revenge. 

12 Rounds of challenges, in fact, that will have Danny racing about like a maniac fighting fires, stealing cars, and rescuing innocent civilians caught unaware that an international arms dealer has made them pawns in an overly complicated revenge scheme. To say that 12 Rounds is derivative of Die Hard and about a dozen other similar trope heavy action flicks would be an understatement. Aside from John Cena's confidently amateurish performance, 12 Rounds would have nothing going for it that wasn't based on nostalgia for the movies that director Renny Harlin is blatantly ripping off. 

If all of this sounds pretty goofball, well it is. It is goofy and that's ok. That really is what 12 Rounds should be. To attempt to take seriously a movie starring a former WWE champion, whose name isn't Dwayne Johnson, and is directed by schlockmeister Renny Harlin, is a fool's errand. 12 Rounds is silly and perhaps not even silly enough. The film is a little up its own backside in the notion of what we are asked to buy into, but with a bar set so low it's more dimwitted than it is egregious or wholly unwatchable. 

The makers of 12 Rounds know they are not making Shakespeare here, they are barely recreating the glory years of Sly Stallone. Renny Harlin and John Cena fully accept their place in the filmmaking world and that gives 12 Rounds a freewheeling air that is almost cheesy enough to be fun. ALMOST. Sadly, the film overstays its welcome by a good 20 minutes or so and by the time that the big helicopter set finale arrives, the cheese has gone cold. 12 Rounds is a bad movie that sadly fails to transcend into full camp potential. Minus that, it's just merely bad and therefore not something I can fully endorse.

Can John Cena act? By the evidence of his first starring role, no, not really, he's got a lot to learn. That said, Cena appears very confident. Cena radiates confidence, not arrogance, genuine confidence. Cena has self-assurance even as he's trapped in a derivative idiot plot. He's giving this role his all and he has an energy to match the intended spirit of 12 Rounds, if not the actual, dreary, final product of 12 Rounds.

Movie Review: Abandon

Abandon (2002) 

Directed by Stephen Gaghan

Written by Stephen Gaghan 

Starring Katie Holmes, Benjamin Bratt, Charlie Hunnam, Zoey Deschanel, Gabrielle Union 

Release Date October 18th, 2002 

Published October 17th, 2002 

The cast of Dawson’s Creek is going to have a tough time shaking their TV characters. As James Van Der Beek showed in Rules OF Attraction, even working with a great filmmaker doesn't allow him to him escape from his TV alter ego. Roger Avery appeared to enjoy using set pieces that traded on the Dawson persona in little winks to the audience that practically screamed "you wouldn’t see Dawson do this!" 

Katie Holmes has a similar problem, her Joey Potter is the picture of cherubic teenage innocence and even stripping in The Gift or going Goth in Disturbing Behavior hasn't separated her from the character that made her famous.  In the new movie Abandon, writer director Stephen Gaghan uses Holmes' TV persona in ways that bring the character a little more depth and makes the film's surprises a little more effective.

In Abandon, Holmes plays Caty Burke an ambitious college senior with a big money job waiting for her when she graduates. Things are not that simple however. Caty is still longing for an ex-boyfriend who disappeared two years previous. The boyfriend, Embry (Charlie Hunnam), vanished without a trace and now is being investigated as a missing person. The company that holds Embry’s million dollar trust wants him to be declared dead so they can move in on his millions. 

The investigation into Embry's disappearance is turned over to a recovering alcoholic cop named Wade (Benjamin Bratt). Wade’s investigation immediately leads him to Caty, the last person to have seen Embry alive. While she isn’t considered a suspect, Wade is suspicious of what she isn’t telling him. The investigation is bringing back a lot of memories for Caty, memories that are keeping her up at night and are beginning to effect her work. Caty is convinced that she has seen Embry recently, and that he is following her with intent to harm her. Not surprisingly she turns to Wade.

It’s not difficult to see where this is going, but director Stephen Gaghan has a few tricks up his sleeve, tossing out red herrings right and left and a brilliant clue early on that makes you feel stupid when it pays off later in the film. Though one too many flashbacks makes the film a little tedious, Gaghan develops enough mystery to keep your attention.

Embry, as played by Charlie Hunnam (best known for TV’s short lived and underappreciated "Undeclared") is such a great character. Embry is this totally self involved artist, the kind of guy every college woman dated for a semester despite the fact that he treated them terribly. Embry is the type of guy who picks up girls by promising to paint their portrait. Hunnam does a fantastic job of portraying the horrible qualities that every woman knows they shouldn’t want but can’t resist. 

Holmes and Bratt don’t have much chemistry, but it was interesting to see a male character as a functionary to a female. Normally in Hollywood it is the female character that is thrown in as a plot point. In Abandon however it is Bratt’s Detective who is the plot point. This is Katie Holmes’s show and while I still can’t get past Joey Potter on the big screen, I’m sure others will be able to put aside the Dawson’s Creek association and enjoy this popcorn thriller. 

Writer-Director Stephen Gaghan, an Oscar winner for his screenplay for Traffic, steps behind the camera for the first time with Abandon and delivers a first-rate Brian De Palma impression, and I mean that in a good way. Abandon is the kind of trashy popcorn flick DePalma made in the 80s with movies like Dressed To Kill, Body Heat and Obsession. While it may not be as memorable as those films, Abandon is nearly as skillfully made and a sign of good things to come from this first-time director.

Movie Review: Batman Begins

Batman Begins (2005) 

Directed by Christopher Nolan 

Written by Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer

Starring Christian Bale, Katie Holmes, Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman

Release Date June 15th, 2005 

Published June 14th, 2005 

Joel Schumacher has committed a number of cinematic sins. His destruction of Andrew Kevin Walker's darkly brilliant script for 8mm or last years 3 hour tin-eared musical Phantom Of the Opera come immediately to mind. But without a doubt Schumacher's most damnable sin is his destruction of the Batman film series. Batman Forever and Batman and Robin are atrocious examples of a director completely bent to the will of marketing executives. A director more interested in creating synergistic toy products and fast food tie-ins than in making entertaining movies.

Eight years after Schumacher killed it, and through three years of torturous development Batman has risen from the ashes once again and in the hands of director Christopher Nolan, an artist and auteur of the highest regard, Batman is not merely back, the D.C Comics franchise is better than ever. Rivaling Raimi's Spiderman and Singer's X-Men, Nolan's Batman Begins is a visionary comic book film worthy of the icon status of the character.

Batman Begins is an origin story that brings fans into the mind of Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) before Batman and shows us why a millionaire playboy would put on a bat suit and fight crime. Locked away in some far off Asian prison a scruffy but handsome American certainly sticks out. Battered and bruised Bruce Wayne has fought everyday he's been in this prison but his latest battle against several large thugs at once brings him to the attention of another handsome westerner, Henri Ducard played by Liam Neeson.

Ducard is a representative of Ra's Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe), leader of the League Of Shadows, a thousand year-old order dedicated to vigilantism. The League Of Shadows fancy themselves ninja crime fighters and in Bruce Wayne they see an asset both physically and otherwise. The League is preparing to raze Gotham City, purging the city of its criminality and anything else that might be in the way. Bruce has a choice: join the League and destroy Gotham or return alone to defend the innocent people of the city.

Returning to his home in Gotham City (Chicago standing in, not New York in this version) Wayne finds the metropolis in ruinous poverty. Crime rules the streets led by mob boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). Among the few good people of Gotham are Bruce's butler, Alfred (the superb Michael Caine), and his childhood friend, Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes), who works as an assistant prosecutor fighting a losing battle with corruption.

Bruce's fortune is intact, the family business is under the control of a corrupt executive played by Rutger Hauer and working in the shadows is a former family friend, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), whose work on various military projects for the company will certainly come in handy when Bruce Wayne is ready to transform into the caped crusader. It is Lucius Fox who creates the suit, the gadgets and the new military style Batmobile, even cooler than the sports car version from Tim Burton's Batman.

The film plumbs the depths of Bruce's past, the biggest factor to his becoming Batman. A childhood accident bred in him a fear of bats. It's a fear that is also linked to the death of his parents in a mugging outside a theater when Bruce was eight years old. A taste for vengeance is what led Bruce to his Asian adventure and the teachings of Ducard are what lead to his taking his fear of the bat as his symbol when he finally decides to take a stand against crime.

It's an extraordinarily detailed and logical story that fits perfectly into the dark atmospheric universe that director Christopher Nolan and writer David S. Goyer, of Blade fame, have created. This Gotham City is in part the vision of Frank Miller's Year One graphic novel balanced with the Auteurist vision of Nolan who nods to Miller but makes the look and feel of the film his own.

Christian Bale is the perfect blend of movie star handsome and brooding maniac, the essence of the Bruce Wayne-Batman dichotomy. Though Batman holds the typical moral values of a superhero-- he captures but does not kill-- he has a definite weird streak.  As Bruce himself points out, "A guy who dresses up as a bat clearly has issues". Those 'issues' are given a thorough and complete examination in Batman Begins and as played by Mr. Bale, they are given the depth and emotionality that the character has lacked in his former movie incarnations.

The supporting cast is exemplary, especially Gary Oldman as "Sgt." Gordon who we all know will someday be Police Commissioner Gordon. This is his origin as well and, with Oldman in this pivotal role, we have a solid basis for further great stories to be told. Katie Holmes is much better than expected in the role of Bruce's childhood friend and adult love interest. She looks too young and innocent for the position of District Attorney fighting the worst of the worst criminals but she has an unexpected steeliness to her that sells the character.

The villains, the most obvious weakness from the Schumacher films, are given a similar comic book realism to that of Batman. Based more in the reality and logic of the story, the villains in Batman Begins are not super villains with grand schemes of mass murder or world domination but logical extensions of the established corruption of Gotham City. Cillian Murphy is terrific as Dr. Jonathan Crane whose alter ego, the Scarecrow, is no psycho du jour but a functionary of a larger, more logical and ordered plot.

Obviously Nolan's Batman Begins cannot help but be compared with the lofty achievements of Bryan Singer's X-Men and Sam Raimi's Spiderman and it is without a doubt worthy of the comparisons. Batman Begins ranks only behind Raimi's Spiderman 2 as the best comic book adaptation I have seen. An awesomely entertaining and involving action packed feature, Batman is back and better than ever in Batman Begins.