WHAT might inspire a billionaire playboy to dress up in a bat suit in order to beat the stuffing out of shifty creeps at 2am? Is there anyone out there mad enough to take this challenge seriously? Step forward Christopher Nolan. I know you’re mostly British but your days as an obscure and fashionable young auteur are over. In fact, you’re fired. Batman Begins is far too adult for a $135 million budget. You’ve turned a DC cartoon strip into an arthouse blockbuster. You make a pensionable legend look like a schizophrenic wreck. And God knows where you parked Robin.

I honestly thought we’d seen the last of Batman when Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher hammered wooden stakes through the hammy franchise in the 1990s. I never expected a guided tour of Bruce Wayne’s brain ten years later, or a director crazy enough to conduct one. But Nolan bucks the lethal odds. Batman Begins is a clever surprise. It’s an exhilarating medley of bruising action that begins in the dark corridors of the caped crusader’s psyche. Christian Bale is the damaged hero, scarred by the murder of his fabulously rich father in Gotham City. I’ve never seen a comic-book saint deliver so many head butts.

His revenge against the underworld hangs by familiar threads; but Wayne’s lack of perspective is unsettling and real. Batman wasn’t invented to agonise about his identity. He was dreamt up one afternoon in 1938 by a modestly talented doodler called Bob Kane. He spent most of his two-dimensional life as an old-school vigilante who would “krunch” thieves through brick walls because they didn’t pay due respect to Commissioner Gordon.

Bale’s protagonist grows up in splendid isolation, nursing a desire for justice like an overripe boil. He goes Awol for seven years and behaves like a tramp. He is thrown into a Chinese prison camp, and is eventually rescued by Liam Neeson, a melancholic ball-breaker who drags him up a Nepalese mountain to tune his martial arts and clear his mind. The training is an electric spectacle, pilfered from the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon school of fantasy. But it’s a peculiar layer of magic realism that doesn’t quite fit. It smacks of over-indulgence.

Bale is inducted into a Fu Manchu army of secret fascists. His melancholic mentor wants to purge the rotten heart of Gotham but there’s a biblical clash of ideals. Neeson has a plan to poison the entire city with a gas that drives people insane. Bale has an urge to suit up as Batman and take out the villains one by one.

The iconic costume disfigures him. The mask is wonderfully menacing. His voice deepens to an electronic snarl. The venom is addictive. So too is revenge. Batman’s futuristic gadgets are marvellously convenient. But there’s nothing reassuring about Bale’s Batman, or the way he operates. That’s the lucrative and elusive pull, and the actor milks it ruthlessly. Like Hamlet, Wayne is emotionally crippled by anger. Like Gatsby, he is imprisoned by his wealth.

What on earth makes this maverick tick? Nolan clings to the unspoken brief like a limpet. It’s the film’s saving grace. His best work, Memento and Insomnia, shape the narrative tension by playing cruel tricks with time and identity. Nolan deploys the same disorientating techniques here to illuminate his hero’s split personality. But the skeleton key to Batman Begins is fear. Ironically, it is Wayne’s fear of bats that fuels the most telling crises. “Bats frighten me,” growls the masked vigilante. “It’s time my enemies shared my dread.”

The subsequent blizzard of expensive action sequences is a schoolboy’s joy. But it’s Batman’s battle with his own demons that lifts the film above the ordinary pulp. There are few more terrifying evils than the ones that fertilise in your head. Cillian Murphy’s beautifully twisted doctor sprays his hapless victims with a hallucinogenic vapour that makes them believe they are talking to their worst nightmare.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• DVD

• Oscars

• Bollywood

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of 2008
• Hitler and the Downfall mash-ups
• Britney Spears: The Circus