MOVIE REVIEWS 'Batman' Flies On the Big Screen ***½ BATMAN. (PG-13) Strikingly original movie - moody, ambiguous, downbeat takes Batman seriously; so will you. Jack Nicholson makes a dazzling Joker and Michael Keaton introduces complexity to the Caped Crusader. Also starring Kim Basinger, Robert Wuhl, Jack Palance. Directed by Tim Burton. At area theaters. By Mike McGrady OTHAM CITY. The night streets are teeming with scavenging hookers and belligerent panhandlers, with brazen muggers and corrupt politicians, with the hunters and the hunted. But on the rooftops, well above the streets, a man wearing the costume of a bat has just decided to spare the life of a petty criminal. "I want you to do me a favor," he explains. "I want you to tell all your friends about me.' "What what are you?" the hoodlum asks. "I'm. Batman." So begins one of the most interesting comic-book movies ever made, a movie that vividly illustrates where most of the others have gone wrong. As a rule, moviemakers assigned to comic books either go in for outlandish overstatement, exaggerating what is already an exaggeration, or aim for camp, making fun of the work even as they're filming it. What makes "Batman" radically different, arresting in its freshness, is that young director Tim Burton has done the unheard-of; he has taken his source material seriously and has made a movie that is dark, somber, impressive and involving on more than a single level. Burton, who demonstrated such cinematic elan with "Beetlejuice," now demonstrates unique respect for his subject. Going back almost 50 years, he has drawn on the earliest portraits of "The Bat-Man," as he was then known, "a mysterious and adventurous figure, fighting for righteousness and apprehending the wrongdoer, in a lone battle against the evil forces of society. This was the Caped Crusader before Robin or the Penguin or any of the other ornithological additions. Batman, as he came to be known, was not as fast as a speeding locomotive, was wholly unable to leap tall buildings in a single bound, was not in the least indestructible. He was just a human being, just another brooding millionaire-philanthropist seeking to avenge the murder of his parents by combating crime. His real edge came from strength, ingenuity, resolve and, to be sure, enough money to buy a Batmobile, a Batplane, a Batarang and a host of other dandy little crime-fighting devices. By honoring these antecedents, Burton has put together a film that is unusually somber for a comic-book movie; much of the action takes place in shadows and night, a perfectly apt backdrop for a film with a psychological focus. Production designer Anton Furst ("Full Metal Jacket"), largely responsible for the tone of the film, has translated Gotham City into a mood poem, a teeming Dickensian cross between the Manhattan of today and the Los Angeles of "Blade Runner." In this hellish setting, a photojournalist (Kim Basinger), aided by a newspaperman (Robert Wuhl), tracks down the strange bat-like figure who has been fighting crime from the rooftops. Quickly, Basinger becomes romantically involved with Batman (Michael Keaton) while being pursued by Batman's nemesis, the fiendishly evil Joker (Jack Nicholson). One of the great strengths of the film is the utter conviction the actors bring to their roles. Keaton is likable, distracted, Michael Keaton as Batman confronts Jack Nicholson as the Joker. complicated enough to handle a double life.. As he understates it to Basinger, ' "My life is . . • very complex." Nicholson's Joker, a work of pure genius, is a murderous cutup, a vicious criminal jealous of Batman's public acclaim: "Can somebody tell me, what kind of world we live in where a man dressed up as a bat gets all of my press?" The Batman-Joker connection is the twine that keeps the parcel together. Each is responsible for creating the other the Joker murdered young Bruce Wayne's parents, forcing him into a life of crime-fighting, and Bat- man caused the Joker's disfigurement by dumping him into a vat of chemical sludge. They represent two sides of a single coin, a Jekyll-Hyde union of the manic and the depressed. So unique is the film's approach that I can think of only one comparable experience; it recalls that time, many years ago, when most of us picked up our first "Batman" comic book, started thumbing through it and got hooked swept along by the powerful visual dynamics and enthralled by the stark drama of good fighting evil on an essentially human battlefield. /11