very rare excellence

Rating: 10/10 (11 August 2008)

Only once every few years does a movie of this caliber get released, the last movie of recent days that impressed me as much as this film did was "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy so this film is now sitting, in my opinion, with the biggest films of all time.
The acting in this film is mostly superb, i say mostly cause the performance of Maggie Gyllenhaal leaves a little bit to be desired and the voice that Christian Bale puts on when he becomes the dark knight is a little over the top plus some very average performances from many minor characters but Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman are all excellent and so is Christian Bale for the most part when you look past the over done voice. For obvious reasons, I left one name out of the list and its the name everyone has been talking about since this movie was released, the sadly departed Heath Ledger.
Heaths performance as the joker is beyond excellent, it puts him up with the greatest actors of all time including Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp. He undoubtedly becomes the Joker and throughout the film you never really see Heath Ledger you are looking at Batman's most famous villain not a man playing him. I did have doubts when i first heard they were casting Heath as the Joker but obviously my doubts have been put to bed.
Now, what makes this film great is not just the acting, its the storyline, the directing by Christopher Nolan and the all round production values are just superb and surpasses the excellent "Batman Begins" by a few miles. The only thing i will say against the storyline is that Harvey Dent's phase as "Two-Face" is way too short lived, they killed him off after about 45 minutes of the character being in the film which disappointed me a little cause Two-Face is an excellent villain.
All in all a brilliant film that deserves all the hype and praise it gets and more with only a few very niggling problems that don't effect the overall score of this film one bit.