"The Dark Joker" or "21st Century Ennui"

Rating: 5/10 (12 May 2009)

The last time I had to ask so many questions during a film was during incomprehensible existential timewaster "Tron" (so now you also know roughly how old I am!). Significant exceptions aside, this is the "Tron" of the modern-day blockbuster world. I emerged saying "yeah, well".
I loved "Batman Begins"; Christian Bale is my favourite Batman; and with this many great actors, it should have been a steal. Michael Caine in particular brings, with his briefest appearance on screen, a wonderful sense of comfort and pathos. But despite all this – despite a general tone suitable to a post-traumatic, mid-recession era – I was left entirely agreeing with a reviewer who described feeling unaccountably "disconnected" from the culture that spawned this film. The breathless adulation that some have heaped on the film has astonished me.
I love dark things: I love film noir; and films of all sorts whose characters who struggle with their souls' messy urgings. But "The Dark Knight" is all dark looks and no urgings. Lots of reviewers have praised the 'dark Gotham' design: huh? It's modern-day New York in low light and with extra night thrown in! How is that brilliant? And the crime wave? You want a truly dark tone, watch "Serpico" or "Blue Collar". To make a really good action film about corruption, everyone – literally everyone – needs to be, or to seem, corrupt. How much more interesting would this film have been if Rachel, Alfred and Lucius Fox were under suspicion, or better still, actually corrupt and working against Batman? Or if Batman were found in his Penthouse by Rachel, curled up naked and whispering mad nothings like a Gotham Howard Hughes? Bale was half asleep, or may as well have been – what a waste of that intense face, his physicality! Ledger was very, very impressive, and this was his film – he would eventually have made the lists of the really great actors if he could have kept from doing rubbish films like "Casanova". The charismatic Maggie Gyllenhaal is a pleasant change but even she can't perform the magic trick of making a meaningful character from an underwritten part. I've seen the Batman back catalogue, but throughout this I kept asking: "soshe knows that Bruce is Batman?" "soshe loves him but she's marrying someone else?" "so.she's known him all his life? Who IS she?" I had no idea that this was the same girl Batman had brushed with in "Begins", so for me, there was no history, no connection, no tension. Everything got absorbed in the central, overstretched idea of Batman's inner darkness versus the Joker's chaos theory.
Like the vision of purgatory that is Batman's temporary lair while Wayne Manor is being rebuilt, mostly I think this film is about nothing more or less than the state of being bored. Batman is bored of his dual lifestyles. The Joker is bored of playing all by himself, the only intelligent psychopath in Gotham. Harvey is bored of winning his not very interesting games of chance. Glass-and-steel Gotham is 1980s dull; crime, which is money, is boring – so boring that the Joker sets his money on fire. That party Bruce throws for Harvey – come on! – the most boring party on earth; Rachel's "love" triangle is the most boring love triangle ever. Maybe a different style altogether would have helped bring this spin on the story alive, such as comic animation in tune with the TV series, or hyper-stylised like "Sin City", which seems apt.
It's absurd to imagine that this film – mere dark-toned spun sugar confection that it is – merits a place in any generation's top 100 list. Here's a revolutionary idea: how about NO more Batman, in this guise at least? Leave the superheroics in the capable hands of Iron Man and Hellboy and move on.