Poor Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale). First, he fell down a well and was traumatized by bats. Then his philanthropic parents, exiting an opera, were murdered by a lowlife. Years later, when the case went to court, the perpetrator got off, thanks to Dr. Jonathan Crane (Gillian Murphy), a nefarious head-shrinker in league with Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson), a powerful mafioso. But just as Bruce prepared to exact his revenge, someone shot his bete noir dead. Drat. What’s a disillusioned aristocrat to do? Flee to Asia on a petty crime spree, obviously.

Follow me now. “Batman Begins” in a grubby Chinese prison camp as moody Bruce squabbles over soup, spits out Mandarin, and busts the heads of a half-dozen fellow inmates. Double drat. But lo! Into his cell appears a mysterious guru, who talks like Yoda and looks like Liam Neeson. His name is Ducard, and he has come to recruit the dejected Gothamite into the League of Shadows, a mountain-dwelling squad of vigilante super-ninjas.

First, however, there will be a challenge: Locate the blue flower on the far side of the meadow, climb up to the highest mountain peak, and there shall you find what you seek. What Bruce seeks, apparently, is a kung-fu training camp run by Fu Manchu – or, as he is called here, Ra’s al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). Thus begins the reformation of young master Wayne, in which he will learn to sword-fight on frozen rivers and internalize the magnificent musings of Ducard: “To conquer fear you must become fear!” Wax on!

All movies are better with ninjas, but is this really the way that “Batman Begins”? Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer think so. The former directed the high-concept grunge thriller “Memento,” the latter wrote such noir fantasies as “Dark City” and the “Blade” trilogy. Together, they have given us the standard genre battiness while attempting a more “realist” comic-book blockbuster.

Phooey to realism if it means under lighting the action, shooting too close, and cutting so fast that nothing makes sense. If, as Assistant District Attorney Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) says, a man is defined by his actions, then Batman is indeed one vague, gloomy, mixed-up man – less heroic than hazy and hectic. Let him be knotted up in angst; must the direction be so as well?

Mr. Nolan eschews the giddy digital geometries of the “Spiderman” movies in favor of muddled melee unworthy of his budget, talents, or the expectations of his audience. His restraint is admirable, but he takes it too far. Withholding becomes weak filmmaking. “Batman Begins” delivers the idea of action rather than action itself.

His best idea is to deglamorize the Bat Stuff. Once the pop-psychological backstory is more or less out of the way, “Batman Begins” becomes a kind of iconographical procedural. The Bat Cave is simply that: a dank gash of space under the east wing of Wayne Manor. No computers, no tricky security system, no fancy hydraulics for the Batmobile – an all-terrain vehicle that definitely does not transform into a submarine or jet.

The Bat Suit is a mix-and-match affair assembled from discarded military projects in the forgotten Applied Sciences division of Wayne Industries. (Morgan Freeman says yes to typecasting as Lucius Fox, the kindly black man in the basement who lives to serve his young Massa Wayne.) The Bat Mask must be ordered from Asia – 10,000 of them, in fact, “to avoid suspicion.” (Holy comic-book logic!) When the first shipment proves defective, Lucius cautions against headfirst landings and orders up another.

Fun stuff, this middle section of “Batman Begins,” in which a disturbed ninja billionaire with delusions of grandeur makes himself over as righteous flying rodent. Yes, the rich are different. Mr. Bale knows this well; what better preparation for the Dark Knight than his definitive turn as the Nietzschean uber-yuppie of “American Psycho”? As Bruce, the actor forefronts a tension-fraught blankness, but his most striking affect is the shockwave of Bat Rage that comes rattling, fearsomely, through the apertures of his mask.

Once suited up, Batman nabs Falcone and takes on the creepy Dr. Crane. From his headquarters at Arkham Asylum, Crane is hatching a plan to spike the Gotham water supply with a dead ly neurotoxin that triggers extreme fear and violence. Thing is, the substance must be inhaled through the lungs. As it happens, a high-tech water evaporating gizmo has just gone missing from Wayne Industries! (Nice work, Mr. Goyer.)

There is much more to the plot, including a revisionist explanation for the fall of Rome. The movie takes itself very, very seriously. Michael Caine enlivens the material with his wry performance as Alfred, trusty butler of Wayne manor. As Jim Gordon, the last good cop in Gotham, Gary Oldman is winningly reserved in his underwritten part. Ms. Holmes makes even less sense as the idealistic ADA. But there must always be a girl, and there she is.

Someone was bound to suffer: at nearly two and a half hours, “Batman Begins” is overstuffed with flashbacks, bit players, mental problems, ninja conspiracies. It’s a jumbo bucket of a popcorn flick: dryness of flavor notwithstanding, just the thing to stuff your gut until a truly delicious summer entertainment shows up on the menu.