Reality Check

Rating: Null/10 (20 July 2008)

Why do I feel reluctant to give this movie a rating of 7 stars out of 10? The average rating on this web site has this movie rated the highest of any movie ever made. I walked out of the theater yesterday evening with the feeling that I had seen one of (yes, I said "one of") the best action movies ever made. But I couldn't shake the feeling that I had just watched just another installment of a new, dark interpretation of a beloved comic book hero.
The truth is, it took so long for the action to really start rolling that my ten-year-old son had fallen fast asleep watching his favorite kind of movie (yet he had seen the attention-grabbing scene where the Joker met the mob bosses and it was still only about 5:30). Once it got going, it got going like few others (and yes, I woke my boy once I knew it would keep his interest).
I think that the director worked so diligently at making the mood of the movie fit the hero's adjective in its title ("Dark"), that it worked against it in the slow spots. Almost EVERYthing about this movie seemed dark. The darkness is so pervasive that even when good things happened, they felt more like a brief relief than something to be happy about.
Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker -- aided, in no small part, by the script -- gave us a disturbing fiend. I managed a few chuckles at the character, but no real laughs. This Joker wasn't really very funny to me because I felt that an attempt was made to portray him a bit more as a "real" person with a severe psychological problem than the over-the-top comic book character that Jack Nicholson gave us. I find it hard to laugh at someone with real (or realistic) problems. (Had I wanted realism, I wouldn't have looked for it in a comic book-hero movie.) We found out, early on, that this Joker was severely twisted, and bad things happened with enough regularity that nothing he did really surprised me. There were some quality scenes, but the director seems to have favored quantity. I thought that more could have been made of some scenes, but the point eventually came where so much had thrown at us that I found myself simply sighing in anticipation of Batman putting the Joker out of our misery.
As for the rest of the main cast... Christian Bale, to me, is serviceable in the role, but not quite believable as Bruce Wayne. Bale is "cool" in the role, but a man accustomed to Bruce Wayne's kind of wealth would have an ease about him that didn't come through in this performance. If they were shooting for realism in the Joker's psyche, they should have been aiming for it here, too. (As for Batman, any of a number of actors in that costume with the voice disguiser would have seemed the same.) Also, I saw no real chemistry between him and his love interest, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Nor did I see any sparks fly between her and her other love interest, played by Aaron Eckhart. Otherwise, Eckhart was quite good as Harvey Dent/Two-Face, I thought. I think that the rest of the cast did alright in their roles. Two worth mentioning in particular were Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman -- not for their outstanding work so much as for the vanilla lines they were given. They did fine jobs with what they were given, but what a waste of talent...
Okay, so I've laid out most of what I didn't like about the movie. What I did like about it was that it did have some great action sequences and special effects. Joker plays a "social experiment" and a variety of other mind games that keep the story interesting in forcing difficult decisions on other characters. That's about it, really, but those things are done exceedingly well. I didn't really care for the pervasive darkness in the atmosphere and mood of many of the characters, but if that's what the director, cast, and crew were shooting for, they did that exceedingly well, too.
Personally, I'm ready to rent the 1989 version of Batman with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. I remember feeling more entertained when I walked out of the theater after seeing that one for the first time than I did yesterday.