"You're harder to kill than a cockroach on steroids," complains the Joker to Batman after a brutal clash from which the Caped Crusader emerges miraculously unscathed.

"Is my shirt too big or is my flesh crawling?" quips another character in "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm," the movie spinoff of the animated television series.

"Batman: Mask of the Phantasm," is heavily larded with sarcastic remarks whose tone of 90's cynicism clashes jarringly with the film's sleek 1940's ambiance. That discontinuity is the least of the many problems afflicting the movie, which opened locally on Christmas Day.

Set in the 1940's, "Mask of the Phantasm" is a cartoon film noir evocation of events that purport to explain the origins of Batman. In convoluted flashbacks, it portrays a star-crossed love affair between Bruce Wayne, the reclusive millionaire who is Batman's alter ego and Andrea Beaumont, a beautiful banker's daughter who suggests a svelte hybrid of Lauren Bacall and Veronica Lake.

After the violent deaths of Bruce's parents, Andrea's love enables him to give up his vow to avenge the killings. But when she abruptly breaks off their engagement and disappears with her father, the Caped Crusader is born out of the emptiness and disillusionment. In solving a series of murders of aging mobsters, Batman discovers that Andrea and her father are caught up in a web of international loansharking. The killer, with whom Batman does battle, is a sinister caped figure who looks so much like him that he finds himself a prime suspect.

The actor's voices may suit animated television characters, but on a large screen Kevin Conroy's Batman, Mark Hamill's Joker, and Dana Delany's Andrea sound flat and one-dimensional. Shirley Walker's overblown score floods the movie with choral bombast that only points up an absence of anything remotely gripping.

With its pointed, cavernous backgrounds and a Gotham City setting that evokes a 1940's-style futurism, "Mask of the Phantasm" looks splendid. But its story is too complicated and the editing too jerky for the movie to achieve narrative coherence. And the resemblance between the movie's hero and its enigmatic arch-villain is so close that audiences are likely to be confused.

The movie is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested).