When I was a kid, he was one of my favourite superheroes. No other (super-, spider-…) man could take his place. I guess it was all Tim Burton’s fault, directing the first Batman movie. There was Batman series before it but you could not take them seriously. Not after you saw the definition of gothic by Burton, supported by a classic soundtrack by Danny Elfman. Those were the days.

The sequels never did match up the original. The second Batman movie, featuring Catwoman and Penguin was a laugh. The third was a joke. And the fourth was a disaster. I think it was safe to say that the Batman movies sucked and that there was only one real Batman movie. Which was made in 1989.

Come 2005 and there is a new Batman movie on the horizon. Following the latest trend, this one goes way back, introducing Batman as a kid, before his first “big job” of saving the Gotham city from Joker. Which makes sense. If all the sequels sucked, you just make a prequel. And hope for the best.

I don’t know about you, but in the first thirty minutes of the movie, I thought it was going to be another flop. The acting was lousy, the dialogues boring and the facts did not match up. For example, in the Burton’s Batman, we can see that Jack Napier, the guy who later becomes Joker and is the reason Bruce Wayne, a richy rich, becomes Batman, kills both of his parents. Here, not only the killer is a completely different person, furthermore he only kills the father. Also I noticed that certain cliche scenes (for example the ones where the hero is in training and practices with his teacher) start to bore me as they provide nothing more but same old “wipe-on, wipe-off” stuff.

But after the first fourty-five minutes, the movie soars. Even Katie Holmes is not a burden here, probably due to the low screen-time. I hate her. She was fine in Dawson creek, but everything else is just garbage.

It’s a classic action movie with witty dialogues and funny remarks that made me laugh a few times (for example, the police is chasing a pre-batmobile and one of the officers asks on the radio “Make and color?” and the response is “It’s a black…erm…tank!“).

All in all, despite a few slip-ups it still brings hope to the Batman franchise. That maybe one day, the Batman will truly return.