Solid Installment in Batman Cinematic Series

Rating: 7/10 (1 November 2008)

With a franchise so popular that serial remakes that started just eight years after the last installment of the original Tim Burton "imagining" are drawing record crowds, the temptation must arise among the new Batman filmmakers to skimp and just let the money roll in on anticipation alone. This reviewer is here to tell you that skimping on much of anything that makes good films good, is not among this picture's issues. With gorgeous location shot after seamless effects shot, this film lushly transforms my home town of Chicago into a cinematographer's Gotham for grown-ups, full of sinister intrigue and frightening violence.
After 2005's 'Batman Begins,' which pitted the Bat against third-string bad-guy, The Scarecrow ( probably because he was the only Batman foe that never appeared in the Burton universe ) we get a main event showdown in this installment featuring not only quintessential Batman baddie, The Joker, but the almost as legendary 'Two-Face.' They square off in an increasingly realistic Gotham devoid almost entirely of comic-book logic except for these three main characters and their methods. Gotham is more like a modern-day New York where monstrous calamity is no joking matter and crime-kingpins are more like terrorists. They variously ensnare each other in plots intricate enough to be really interesting but paced and edited too ungenerously to reliably follow. The pay-off is almost always some spectacular confrontation however, so you won't really care who's fooling whom. Basically, The Joker steps into the power vacuum created when the mob is weakened by Batman and especially by the new cracker-jack D.A., Harvey Dent. Dent is so effective, Bat alter-ego Bruce Wayne decides it might be time to hang up his cowl. And Assistant D.A. ( presumably ) Rachel Dawes helps drive the film's plot from her corner of the love triangle she inhabits with Wayne and Dent.
Christian Bale delivers another highly effective Batman despite a bat-suit that's making him look more like Robocop than acrobat; more cosmonaut than crusader. When doing the Wayne character, he is a breezy businessman with a babe on each arm and not a care in the world. But when he's Batman, he is a seething, fearsome spirit with a growling, gravelly voice reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry.
Aaron Eckhart is a near-perfect latter-day Harvey Dent and his unlikely transformation into the hideously re-imagined Two-Face seems unlikely mostly due to the script and not his acting.
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays love interest, Rachel Dawes, and does so via her usual every-girl-in-unusual-circumstances bit and one suspects you'd get a speech on the virtues of acting-by-reacting from her if you met her at a cocktail party.
Gary Oldman does another adequate James Gordon, overwhelmed police lieutenant, and probably ought to be applauded for letting Ledger and Bale hog the spotlight.
But the true star of this picture is Heath Ledger's The Joker and it is a long way from Jack Nicholson's mob-climber-turned-nihilist-poison-freak. This Joker delivers not one joke for the entire film, but wry snarkiness instead, along with sadistic irony. Ledger plays him more like a lower-case Hannibal Lecter in a purple suit and with more animate limbs. And sure, he'll probably get a posthumous Oscar and we're all sad Ledger accidentally killed himself with a bunch of pills he probably had no business ingesting. But what about the guy who originally envisioned the Joker character  what does HE get? He invented a really clever bad-guy, way back when, who was diabolical by virtue not of his anti-social sadism, but by the mere fact that it's occasionally very hard to hate a criminal who makes you laugh. One who is the perfect foil by being the antithesis of the Batman's gravitas, heroics, and law-and-order nobility. Watching Batman somehow overcome The Joker's mockery by showing he wasn't above a little self-humor was always the best shape I ever saw this contest take and one I've seen done so well in a number of comic books and one that Hollywood just can't seem to get right about this classic duel. Whoever originally wrote the Joker character would probably enjoy Ledger's Gen-Y method-actor interpretation about as much as Nicholson's Hollywood fat-cat offering.
Jokes, guys. The Joker tells jokes  it's right in his name.
Indeed this film's biggest failing is its humorlessness. Even in a serious retelling of this increasingly fabled tale, there's got to be a little room for some gallos humor  I mean it's about a guy who runs around dressed up like a big bat. Come on. It ain't Shakespeare.
I also didn't care for the Batman-as-Jack-Bauer scene where the cops let him rough up the Joker in an interrogation room  made all the worse by the fact that it yielded germane information. My Batman uses his noodle to anticipate and understand, not his biceps to bully and berate. I also could have used a few dramatic scenes that lasted more than two minutes. Why was Dent so nuts about Dawes? Their affections go completely unexplored. Remind me again why this zillionaire likes to risk his neck every night instead of playing Baccarat? Oh yeah, that whole thing with his parents. Batman is a haunted and flawed character made redeemable mainly by his ability to be less haunted than the bad-guys he catches  these motivations go unexamined.
All that said, 'The Dark Knight' is great fun at the movies and mainly deserves the accolades it's been getting. The story is crisp, the action fresh, the gadgets cool, and the atmosphere enticing. In a really effective ending, the humanity and decency of the average citizenry is affirmed and the Joker's plan to uncover some alternate truth is effectively dealt with.
Solid themes, good story, great cinema. If you only see this one film all summer, you'll probably have enough movie-fun to last you till fall.
This movie review by Erik Gloor