Transformers Dark Of The Moon - Slightly less stupid

When you look back on your life, you’ll remember the big moments. Yet, life isn’t really big moments. It isn’t weddings and birthdays or that time you got drunk and attacked a cop. Life is the long stretches in between all of that. It’s the hours you spent driving to the wedding, or the beers you drank with your friends before throwing the punch. If life is what happens between big moments, then Transformers: Dark of the Moon is lifeless. It contains only big moments and none of the in between. It’s no way to tell a story. For the big moments to make any sense, you have to know how you got there. You’ll walk out of Dark of the Moon with a firm idea of who won in the end, but no real idea of the journey the film’s characters took to make their victory happen. Maybe you won’t care. 

You won’t care because even though you’ll have no idea how Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) and his soldiers got up in that building to fight Decepticons, you’ll be too busy being wowed by what happens while they fight them to worry about it. There’s too much exploding, too many robots transforming, too many long and lingering shots of a pretty girl posing, or smart people hacking, or comedic characters behaving comedically, or giant buildings falling, to really stop and realize that actually, none of this seems to fit together. 

It’s not an accident. I feel confident in saying that Transformers director Michael Bay knows he’s missing most of his story’s connecting tissue, and somewhere along the way decided we wouldn’t care and he didn’t either. It’s as if this is the perfect expression of what he’s been going for all along and never quite achieved with his other, comparatively life-laden films. Because of that it may be tempting to call this movie dumb, to accuse it of pandering to people without the soul or subtlety to stay with something smarter. I can’t do that. Movies for dumb people spell everything out for them, and even though Dark of the Moon seems crafted primarily to stimulate a series of easily reached pleasure centers and nothing else, it still asks a lot from its audience. 

In the process of skipping over all that life stuff to show us only those high-interest moments, the movie asks us to fill in those between bits on our own. Bay trusts that his audience is capable of doing that, he trusts that the people watching will have enough imagination to fill in all those missing, boring parts without him. He doesn’t seem to think he has to show you the flights of stairs Sam Witwicky climbed to get to the top of that building with his soldier pals, or the heaps of smashed girders and concrete they must have had to crawl over on floor twenty-six to make it up to floor one-hundred and twenty-seven. He’s too busy showing us all the robots they get to fight once there, and trusts that people watching will be smart enough to figure out on their own what it must have taken for them to find their way to the top. 

Is it bad storytelling? It would be if this happened accidentally, but if you’ve seen Bay’s other movies, you know this is a style he’s been working towards for awhile. It’s no mistake that he’s made a movie without all those life parts, this is what he’s always wanted, it’s just taken three Transformers movies for him to get there. Because of that there’s almost no point in telling you what this movie’s about. You already know. There are robots. There are things for them to demolish. They fight. You’ll have fun watching this and won’t even remember that the plot involves alien technology hidden on the dark side our moon being brought to Earth to cause trouble, let alone think about Sam Witwicky newly graduated from college and struggling to get a job. Sorry Shia LaBeouf, you are no longer needed in these films. 

It all works, after a fashion. It’ll never be as good as the first Transformers, when there really was a story to tell, when it really was a movie about life, wrapped around the relationship between a boy and his first car. The best movies do what Bay’s doing here and make it feel like a part of life too. This is not one of the best movies, it’s the best of what we’re left when you remove all substance, and what we’re left with is infinitely better than the middle ground tread by the previous Transformers film. Dark of the Moon has taken out all the bad jokes and the boring stuff to give us two and a half hours full of nothing but the biggest special effects any movie has ever offered in stunning 3D, and it’s doing it better than any other movie has before. 

Gone are most of the incomprehensible shaky cam effects of the previous movie, in a movie that’s nothing but action, Bay seems determined to give us action we can actually follow this time around. He succeeds in that. You’ll know whose head Optimus Prime just ripped off, when he rips it. You’ll know to clap when the battle’s won. You’ll believe there’s a gigantic building falling over in front of you, and in a summer movie that’s pretty good. I still wish the robots weren’t designed like gigantic piles of animated garbage, I wish the movie had time to give them all personalities before killing them off and asking us to care about it, but that’s just never going to happen. Michael Bay is no longer interested in that kind of Transformers film. 

Sure it’s far too long, a little exhausting, and it doesn’t really seem to contain any actual characters let alone a story for them to be in. Those of you worried whether Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whitely would be able to replace Megan Fox should have remembered that. She’s not in this movie as an actress, she’s a posable action figure for Michael Bay to slide his camera over. The robots are only set pieces, the men primarily placeholders who stand and fire guns. More than either of the previous films, this Transformers 3 feels like an ultra-violent version of the two-dimensional cartoon it’s based on. I think I’m almost alright with that, when it’s done this well, in this kind of summer blockbuster. We’d probably all be happier watching another movie like Inception, but as long as those movies still get made, I guess there’s nothing wrong in sitting down with a Transformers: Dark of the Moon, once in awhile.

Grade - C- 
Its special effects and 3-D shots are undeniably impressive, but they aren't enough to fill up its loud, bloated running time or mask its thin, indifferent script

Transformers - Revenge Of The Fallen - Seriously, what happened?!?

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an exhausting experience. It’s an assault on the senses, a visual blur of incomprehensible, never-ending action. It’s like standing in the middle of a dust storm and opening your eyes to let the grit pour in. Car parts fly around the screen as if in a scrap metal tornado, a tornado which we’re told is a group of robots beating the hell out of each other, but without a pause button it’s impossible to comprehend where one robot’s fist ends and the other’s face begins. It is of course accepted practice that any sequel must take everything the original did and make it bigger, faster, and more explosive. Revenge of the Fallen does that and takes it much, much too far. 

This is probably a good time for a positioning statement. I’m not some critical snob who sneers at Michael Bay movies and only gives good reviews to films in which people stand around talking. I grew up with the Transformers, I love the Transformers, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I loved the first movie… Michael Bay mega-ego and all. By using the simple, somewhat universal story of a boy and his first car as a starting point, Transformers connected with the audience and drew us in. Perhaps even more importantly in this kind of film, the action was exciting, interesting, and in its own way innovative. 

Enter the sequel. Remember all those minor problems in the first one? Sometimes the camera would move too fast or occasionally our view would be too zoomed in to really tell what was going on. Or what about those random subplots involving Jon Voight and the world’s hottest computer nerd, which never really went anywhere? Take all of those flaws, make an entire movie out of them, and you’ll have the sequel. Where the original film was held together by the simple notion of a boy and his car, the sequel is all over map. There’s Sam, back again and off to college. That would have been the perfect thing to hang this movie on, the idea of a kid growing up, leaving home, and becoming a man.Revenge of the Fallen explores that for all of five seconds before yanking Sam off on some endless chase across the desert in pursuit of we don’t really know what to stop some vague, ancient, evil Autobot nemesis. 

Truthfully the plot is impossible to sum up. Suffice to say there are bad robots and there are good robots and Sam Witwicky is the key to which side will end up winning. Sam brings his girlfriend along with him, for no particular reason other than that she’s Megan Fox and she’s really hot. Fox’s character in this film couldn’t be more superfluous. After the first hour or so she serves no purpose in the story and if Sam were even a halfway decent boyfriend he would long ago have forced her to go home rather than repeatedly throwing her in the face of machine gun fire. The film’s robot side characters rarely receive any better treatment than their human counterparts. Jetfire, a fan favorite from the cartoons, is introduced and gets a fully fleshed out storyline, but with the exception of Optimus and Bumblebee everyone else is merely background noise. Characters step on screen to take the spotlight and then suddenly vanish for no particular reason, never to be seen again. 

Luckily the impotence of most of the movie’s supporting cast is rendered all but irrelevant since so little of the film is devoted to character development. Mostly it’s two and a half hours of non-stop, absolutely endless action action action. There’s not a five minute stretch in the entire film that isn’t filled with guns being fired, metal colliding with metal, and buildings being blown to hell. Unfortunately at no point in this violence fog is it ever entirely clear what’s going on. There’s a decent sequence towards the middle of the film in which Optimus single-handedly takes on three Decepticons. It’s fun, but that’s the last fun to be had in the movie as it quickly devolves into characters, both human and alien, standing around in the desert and shooting endlessly at each other. 

You’ll see robots grappling, blasting, screaming… but most of the time you won’t know which robots are screaming or shooting or dying or grappling. The first movie at least had the decency to give some of the main transformers names, gave us a few minutes to see them and figure out what each different character looked like. The sequel has dozens and dozens of basically interchangeable robots who exist primarily as cannon fodder to get shot, fall down, and then be replaced by another robot who magically falls out of the sky and looks pretty much the same. 

This isn’t a just problem of the way Bay chose to edit Revenge of the Fallen, but also in the way most of the transformers are constructed. When they change into their robot forms they’re all crevices and creases and gears and constantly changing parts. They’re all extremely complicated designs. It’s not the sort of thing you can see flash in front of the camera for only a microsecond, and still understand exactly what it is that you’re looking at. Bay though, treats them as if they’re all basic flat surfaces and flashes past robots in battle as if we already know what each bot looks like and so he doesn’t really need to waste much time showing it. 

It’s actually a huge relief when the robots transform into their vehicle mode, since it allows you to stop straining and struggling to figure out what that is flailing around in front of you. When they’re in their vehicle modes you can sit back, relax and whisper to your friend “oh yeah, that was Bumblebee all along”. Except you should have known it was Bumblebee all along, otherwise how do you know what’s going on? It’s frustrating and burdensome, laboring to figure out what that is in front of the camera when you should be sitting back, relaxing, and enjoying. 

It’s almost as if standard film projectors aren’t up to displaying the level of detail Bay uses in his action sequences or keeping up with the speed at which he runs them, and so it all ends up as a useless battle haze. Worst of all, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen clocks in at over two and a half hours. It’s unforgivably long and a brutally tiring, unrewarding experience; a torrent of random action thrown up against the screen without purpose or thought for the audience sitting there watching it. 

This time Michael Bay has gone too far. While it’s hard not to be at least a little impressed with the sheer volume of effects wizardry going on here, and while fans will almost certainly still find something to love simply in seeing their favorite characters back up on screen, it’s hard to consider Revenge of the Fallen anything but a failure. What should have been the ultimate summer spectacle is the ultimate in blockbuster over-indulgence, an already excess prone director given too much freedom and too much money to do everything he wants all at once. Someone put a muzzle on Michael Bay, before he eats his audience. 

Grade - D-
If you want to save yourself the pain, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

The Hurt Locker - I'm wonderful, how are you?

Kathryn Bigelow, who has not made enough great movies given the talent she so often flourishes, likes to pitch her films in “heightened emotional states”. These are her own words. Her milieus, however diverse, come super-charged: the roving cowboy vampires of Near Dark, gurgling with blood-lust; the adrenaline junkies of Point Break, funding their surf habits by holding up banks beneath Nixon and Reagan masks; or the techno-junkies dealing in brain clips in the underrated future noir, Strange Days. In K-19, a rickety Russian sub is hit by both radiation leaks and mutiny. Not for the former Mrs. Cameron the tribulations of the average schmo, but beautiful, young men (rarely does she break boundaries of age, sex or general attractiveness) getting high on risk while draped in her trademark high style; a luxuriant if sometimes potty dance of death.

For her latest, and best, adventure in extremis, she couldn’t have found a more heightened state if she went on location to the moon: the very earthbound world of bomb-disposal experts plying their knife-edge trade in the inferno of the Iraq war. It’s required her to strip back her artsy leanings for the stomach-churn of docu-intense vérité. Aside from the odd surreally beautiful, slo-mo dust blizzard care of the various explosive tremors, we are shoved face-first into a grungy hellscape patrolled by pinwheeling handheld cameras, designed precisely to throw you completely off-balance and strip away any cinematic grandeur. Indeed, the film itself does little more than follow the daily shift of confronting suspected IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), terrifyingly ramshackle Heath Robinson contraptions built from old shells and hidden elusively amid the wreckage of Baghdad.

Unlike the tirade of recently failed Iraq-themed efforts, the impenetrable geopolitics of the Middle East are not on Bigelow’s mind, nor are the straightforward slings and arrows of the modern combat flick. She’s all about visceral participation. The result is a spare, unyielding masterclass in the racking-up of tension to the point thrill distorts into exquisite agony — not a second relents. If you think the mindless clank of Transformers 2 is a rollercoaster ride, just try riding the steel-wire tension of the opening sequence, where a ‘regular’ mission inexorably slips into horrific mishap at the glimpse of as simple a thing as a mobile phone. While planted in reality, the film shares the oxygen-stifling grip of James Cameron’s Aliens and his finesse with the choreography of action. For every threat, the ground is surveyed, the dynamics assessed, putting you into the epicentre of the crisis. There is also something bizarrely science-fictional in the vision of a soldier, sweltering in the 140-degree heat of a protective spaceman suit, treading softly through the moonscape of empty streets to his dance with death.

Bigelow is especially good on the disorientation and flat-out weirdness of stalking the fragged ruins of Baghdad, where everyone — be they child, adult, old-timer or goat — is a potential trigger. The camera twitches and jerks to the soldiers’ rhythms, glancing toward every flicker of movement, deciphering every friendly advance. Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (who gave such an unbearable doom-pulse to United 93) had four handheld cameras whirring simultaneously, generating 200 hours of footage, which the editors have pared down into bone-shards of storyline. The drama operates as a set of increasingly unhinged encounters between a team of young EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) ’tecs and their unpredictable quarry — even the plot twitches like it’s been lubricated with Red Bull.

“War is a force that gives us meaning,” trumpets noted war reporter Chris Hedges in the introductory quote used in lieu of opening credits. “War,” he concludes, “is a drug.” And we soon gather that hero/villain/fuck-up hybrid Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is addicted to the head-rush of communing with these piecemeal death-traps. He’s like the brooding son of Colonel Kilgore, minus the cowboy jingoism, and his nerveless gung-ho attitude will stretch relations with his fellow team-members, twitchy greenhorn Eldrige (Brian Geraghty) and gruff, pragmatic Sanborn (Anthony Mackie). A man running this close to death has to be borderline psychopath.

Iraq, it turns out, is merely context. As many of the Oliver Stone school of ’Nam films refused to dally with politics to embody the increasing delirium of experience, it serves as a setting in which to observe how the male psyche endures under impossible pressure. Screenwriter Mark Boal, a magazine journalist who has specialised in the human truths of the Iraqi conflict, writes in strafes of agitation and desperation. The result is a vivid study of existential confrontation as daily routine — how facing your own death becomes the ultimate trip.

James comes across like one of those pumped goons from 300, but with a swell of emotions that hiccup to the surface. He keeps attempting human basics — bonding with a local boy (amusingly flogging pirate DVDs to the soldiers), trying to discover common ground with his team mates, finding something, anything, outside of the vortex of bomb disposal — but he’s too on edge, sucking up adrenaline like a vampire, treating everything, and everybody, as if they are a death-loaded challenge to be overcome.

The effortless (and more than a little Oscar-worthy), not-quite handsome Renner, a relative unknown (note: star names on the cast list can be treacherous red herrings), creates a new form of war-damage. His is a life inverted: listless and out-of-kilter when fumbling with wife and child, almost serene when slowly following the red wires to their slippery conclusions.

The Hurt Locker, such a bruising, brilliant experience, can be viewed as the culmination, to date, of Bigelow’s heightened MO. Amongst her snorting satire of macho posturing that was Point Break crops up a pumped and tattoo-splattered surf-warrior derisively dubbed War Child. Now, heartbreakingly, she has found a true war child, a soul that can only function in country. Without the breast-beating of the Sarandon-Robbins crew, without much Bush-bashing at all, it’s a tragic picture of men defined by conflict.

If it lacks the grand breadth of the great war movies, the mythical elevation of an Apocalypse Now, say, Bigelow has envisioned a stunning microcosm of hell that asks the most nakedly important question of all: will they make it?

Grade - A+

 Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is thus far the best of the recent dramatizations of the Iraq War

Gladiator - Are You Not Entertained?!

It's ironic — in an Alanis Morissette kinda way — that a new breed of action hero should have been born of a film that harks back so resolutely to a past era. Not the era of ancient Rome as such, but of the Hollywood period epic which presided over the blockbuster pantheon from the days of silent cinema to the 1970s, when it was usurped by the more contemporary spectacles of blazing skyscrapers and overturned ocean liners.

Grand scale sci-fi and the FX revolution of the late 70s/early 80s effectively delivered the deathblow to the sword'n'sandal monolith. We can be grateful then that it was Scott, a director renowned for his majestic cinematic vision, who chose to breathe new life into the old war-horse. And what life it is.

After an initial period of uncertainty, Scott leapt aboard when he was shown a Victorian painting of two gladiators locked in mortal combat, the sunlight streaming into the arena and the vast crowd baying for blood. It's not hard to see what appealed to him: the intensity of the moment, the sweeping spectacle and the image itself, a portrait of a fantastically advanced society resplendent in cultural riches yet underpinned by obscene cruelty and recreational violence.

The opening battle scene, visceral, mud-spattered and drenched in blood, sets the tone. Hordes of extras crashing against each other in waves; agonising hand-to-hand combat; a deluge of flaming arrows and exploding fireballs turning the forest into a hellish conflagration; the noise and stench and chaos of the melee. And Scott puts us right in the thick of it. Brilliant use of Steadicam and stroboscopic editing give you a taste of military conflict from a time when to kill a man in battle meant standing close enough to feel his breath on your face.

The sequence is one of many stunning set pieces that punctuate the story of Maximus Decimus Meridius (Crowe), the star general of the Roman army who is betrayed by the Emperor Commodus, sold into slavery and forced to become a gladiator. Plotting revenge for the murder of his wife and child, he becomes a hero of the people, ultimately confronting his nemesis on the killing floor of the Colosseum. Originally the part of Maximus was earmarked for Antonio Banderas (that's why, presumably, he's Spanish). Banderas makes a lot of sense — he has the looks, the physicality and screen presence. But luckily, he bailed, leaving the way open for Crowe. Crowe has all the qualifications that Banderas has, but where Banderas' prowess as an action star is essentially cinematic (he looks good firing a handgun in slo-mo, basically), Crowe gives the impression that he genuinely is quite a bit harder than the average nail.

He is worlds away from the ludicrous, neo-narcissist musclemen of the 80s (Arnie, Sly et al) and doesn't fit comfortably into the mid 90s school of lithe pretty boys (Keanu, Nic Cage etc.) either. Instead, like the film itself, he's a throwback to the action stars of yesteryear. Kirk Douglas is, for several reasons, the obvious example: unconventionally handsome, athletic without being showy and, most importantly, as solid as a rock. (Douglas also played a gladiator in some film or other.) Crowe is not a big man, he certainly doesn't have a bodybuilder's physique, but in the fight scenes his victories are totally convincing, even when he's pitted against seemingly insuperable odds. The look in his eyes, wracked with pain, boiling with testosterone and burning with hate has a singular message: don't fucking mess.

The fights themselves are thrillingly orchestrated and again feature fractured, kinetic editing and dynamic camerawork. They are so exciting, in fact, particularly the one where Maximus fights the retired champion while snarling tigers hem them into the centre of the arena, you get the slightly uncomfortable feeling that the emotions they stir are not so very far removed from those experienced by the roaring crowd. Scott's Rome — part ancient metropolis, part modern Manhattan, part Speer's Nazi Berlin — are suitably awe-inspiring; Joaquin Phoenix enjoys himself immensely as the loopy Commodus and there's a host of fruity English thesps filling up the type of roles that were once the preserve of Jack Hawkins, Peter Ustinov and Larry Olivier.

David Hemmings is tremendous as the ringmaster Cassius, Richard Harris cuts the ham thick as Emperor Marcus Aurelius and Derek Jacobi (no stranger to a toga) is typically solid as a liberal senator. But of the character players it is, of course, Oliver Reed who leaves the most indelible impression. Reed died during the production, but his gruff, bravura performance as gladiator trainer Proximo is a fitting swansong and his final line of dialogue — "We mortals are but shadows and dust" — a hauntingly apt epitaph. That said, "You sold me queer giraffes!" is an even better one

Grade - B+

Crowe's steely, soulful performance makes this one of the best revenge films to date

Transformers - BOOM!

Watching one of Michael Bay's deafening action movies makes you realise how Wile E Coyote felt when Road Runner succeeded in dropping a One Ton weight squarely on top of him from an enormous height. As reviewers and critics alike staggered out of the press screening of Bay's latest offering, suffering from the triple-whammy of tinnitus, blurred vision and sheer resentment, we resembled a coach party outing from the local head injury clinic.

Urhhhhhh. Transformers is based, ultimately, on a toy brand from the manufacturer Hasbro. There. I've said it. A toy brand. It's not even based on a computer game. That's how fantastically de-evolved the whole sorry business is.

Anyway. A toy brand. But any sense of toy consumers - ie children, with their innocence, playfulness, imagination and charm - has been chucked overboard in favour of a boorish celebration of the film's dumbest and most reactionary demographic of 15-to-25-year-olds, to whose masturbatory needs Bay caters with passionate urgency.

Transformers are an extra-terrestrial race of beings who assume the appearance of cars or other types of hardware, but then with much whirring and clanking turn into humanoid-looking giants adorned with hi-tech looking visors in place of faces, and low-tech rusty bits of metal, nuts, bolts, plates and even untransformed car tyres all over the rest of their bodies, like genetically mutated creatures from a monster truck rally.

But it's more complicated than that: as described in the publicity material, the good ones are the Autobots®, and the bad ones are the Decepticons® - and heaven help you, incidentally, if you attempt to make free with Hasbro's trademarked names. The Decepticons® are a race of beings apparently so brazen in their evil that they have consented to have the wicked concept of deception actually enshrined in their own name! Deceiving is what the other team do as well, of course, but this dissembling is limited to the morally neutral business of suddenly pretending to be a car.

Transformers both bad and good show up on earth, and one of the good ones insinuates itself into the life of an (allegedly) likable teen dork called Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), taking the form of a beat-up old car that his grouchy dad has agreed to buy him for his 17th birthday. Instantly, the car behaves like Herbie on crack, though it does facilitate his adorably klutzy wooing of a babelicious hottie called Mikaela (Megan Fox) who is supposedly a teenager but looks like Courteney Cox Arquette's world-weary older sister.

The good transformer is here to battle the bad ones, who arrive, triggering a spectacular fire-fight with US armed forces, with tanks and armoured trucks spinning through the air and crashing noisily - and I do mean noisily - to earth. They succeed in hacking into top-secret military computers sucking super-important data out of them with astonishing speed. The Pentagon recruits a super-cool army of pulchritudinous students to help them identify these cyber-attackers.

And it is at this point that Bay boldly ventures into the field of geo-political comment. One of the students wonders if Iran could be behind it. Another snorts: "It's way too smart for Iranian scientists - what about China?" Well, naturally. On the UN Index of scientists' smartness, Iran scores pitifully low, whereas the Chinese are a right old bunch of brainiacs. I and others have written about Hollywood's continued reticence about naming America's real-world enemies. This gratuitous, nervy dismissal of "Iranian scientists" comes closer than most.

Jon Voight plays the glowering secretary of state for defence, and John Turturro is an ambiguous and thoroughly unlikable operative with a secretive government agency who attempts to push our young hero around, and is duly punished by being embarrassingly stripped down to his underwear.

And so the crash-bang story continues with eardrum-perforating explosions and detonations. The Transformers fight humans, and each other. Nobody can hear themselves think. The soundtrack is at Krakatoa levels and the editing is frenzied, almost stroboscopic, so much so that you can't really get a clear look at what the Transformers actually look like.

It's all part of the sensory-overload that the great man himself delicately calls "screwing the frame". And he has outdone himself this time. In Transformers, the director and the frame have protracted and meaningful relations, and it is over two hours before Mr Bay as it were pulls on his trousers and promises to call the frame some time next week.

It won't be long before these lovebirds get back together.

Grade - C-

At its best, tolerable, at its worst, your standard Michael Bay blockbuster (bad basically)

Batman Begins - Welcome Back Bats

As the title suggests, this sets out to be radically different from the series inaugurated by Tim Burton's Batman in 1989 and trashed by Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin in 1997. Indeed, director Christopher Nolan gets even further than Burton from the camp of the 1960s TV show, to the point where you wonder how cartoonish Bat-foes like the Penguin could ever appear in Nolan's rusty, economically desperate Gotham City.

Whereas Burton sketched an Art Deco hell and shoved Michael Keaton on screen in a Bat-suit in the first minutes, Nolan puts off the moment when Christian Bale dons the mask for almost an hour. Influenced by the look and feel of the X-Men films, Batman Begins spends a lot of time in a world only just removed from reality before getting to the superheroics.The first act finds Wayne in a Chinese prison and a Himalayan monastery, transforming from bearded brawler to black-clad ninja as he flashes back to a lifetime of trauma that - in this version - began even before his parents' deaths, as he falls down a well and is terrorised by the bats which later inspire his night persona. Burton had Wayne's mom and pop killed by the hoodlum who would become The Joker, but Nolan reverts to earlier comics and makes the murderer a panicky no-one named Joe Chill, blurring the set-up so young Bruce and even Wayne Sr. (Linus Roache) must take some blame for the killings.

The Nolan who made Memento and Insomnia is at home with extreme psychological states - this might complete a Three Colours Of Neurosis trilogy by following memory loss and sleeplessness with phobia. It's certainly a smart move to cast the former Patrick Bateman as a Batman who always seems about to crack up. Bale even makes the old playboy-idiot act work, suggesting - as Michael Caine's dry Alfred notes - a man who needs to pretend to have fun because he might accidentally enjoy himself.

Batman maintains a secret identity, but he's recruiting an army for a war - forming alliances with Gordon (Oldman), the only honest cop in Gotham, and Wayne Enterprises' R&D man Lucius Fox (Freeman), while treating childhood sweetheart/Assistant D. A. Rachel Dawes (Holmes) as much as an informant as love interest (she takes the role played in comics by Harvey Dent, who becomes the disfigured villain Two-Face, suggesting a possible career-changing stretch for Holmes if this thread carries through).

With a city that looks less fantastical than Burton's, Nolan hits the streets and slums of Gotham to show a horrific escalation of evil that demands Batman's presence even as Gordon suggests he might make it worse; old-fashioned Mob guys (Tom Wilkinson) are edged out by masked freaks (Cillian Murphy, starily creepy even before he pulls on his Scarecrow hood) and a fanatical force run by the bastard sons of Fu Manchu and Osama bin Laden. Unlike Burton, Nolan doesn't skimp on action either, with brutal fights, vehicle chases and, in one great sequence, a mass escape from Arkham Asylum of serial killers and maniacs doped up with the Scarecrow's fear serum.

In terms of big-screen comic-adaptation triumphs, it's recently been Marvel who've been ahead (X-Men, Blade, Spider-Man); but, by learning several tricks from Marvel franchises, Batman Begins undoubtedly gets rival comics house DC back in the game.

Grade - A+

Significantly grittier than previous Bat-beginnings, this finds new things to do with, and say about, a character who's been around since 1938. In a year when the franchise watchword is "dark", this delivers the full noir with a side order of dementia.

Casino Royale - All in

The only thing missing from Casino Royale is a truly memorable theme song. Otherwise, this has almost everything you could want from a Bond movie, plus qualities you didn’t expect they’d even try for. It does all the location-hopping, eye-opening stunt stuff and lavish glamour expected of every big-screen Bond, but also delivers a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Fleming’s short, sharp, cynical book with the post-WWII East-vs.-West backdrop persuasively upgraded to a post 9/11 War on Terror.

From Goldfinger on -- especially in the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan films -- the usual gambit has been to open with a pre-credits sequence highlighting amazing stuntwork and a larger-than-life exploit. Here, with a new actor cast as a Bond only just issued with his license to kill, we get an intense, black and white scene set in an office in Prague. Bond has just killed his first man – as shown in brief, brutal fight flashbacks which strain the 12A rating – and confronts a traitor in British Intelligence, exchanging pointed dialogue which leads to the ice-cold agent’s demonstration that the second killing is easier (‘Considerably’). The famous iris pose brings in colour, and a brilliantly-designed (shame about the song) titles sequence that highlights not an anonymous beauty but the silhouette of Daniel Craig himself.

For a few reels, Casino Royale lets the new boy settle in to what could almost be a Brosnan or Dalton movie – hard-hitting, but tinged with the fantastical. Bond goes off the map to harry the organisation of ‘banker to the world’s terrorists’ LeChiffre, with a beddable beach beauty along the way, and a thwarted attack on a super-sized jet aeroplane which could have been the climax of any other adventure. Then, with a notable click into focus, the movie segues into Fleming’s tight, twisted plot. Readers will be amazed to find the book’s most memorable scene (involving a wicker chair with the bottom cut out) is included, as is Bond’s brutal Mickey Spillane-ish last line (though, here, he doesn’t quite mean it).

Director Martin Campbell, who set a high mark in GoldenEye that subsequent craftsmen haven’t matched, returns, and regular scripters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade get Oscar-polishing assist from Paul Haggis. There are nods to tradition, with respectful Aston-Martin product placement, but also refreshing breaks from established practice. Judi Dench’s imposing M is held over, but supporting comedy characters like Q and Miss Moneypenny sit this one out. Mads Mikkelsen’s LeChiffre has a physical tic and a lethal girlfriend, but this villain interestingly has as much to lose as the hero, playing cards because he lost terrorist money and needs to make up the shortfall before his clients kill him.

There are miscalculations (a collapsing building in Venice is a gimmick too many in an emotional finale which would play better without all the noise) and audiences who just want a handsome fantasy figure might find a muscular Bond with perpetually bruised knuckles and the beginnings of a drink problem too much of a stretch. But long-running series can only survive through constant renewal. Casino Royale is the most exciting Bond film, in conventional action terms but also in dramatic meat, since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with the added advantage of a star who finally delivers what the credits have always promised: ‘Ian Fleming’s James Bond’.

Grade - A-

Contrary to pre-release nay-sayers, Daniel Craig has done more with James Bond in one film than some previous stars have in multiple reprises. This is terrific stuff, again positioning 007 as the action franchise to beat.