Not Very Good

Rating: 4/10 (26 December 2008)

I waited until the DVD came out and the initial media coverage had played out. This movie made money only due to the unfortunate passing of Heath Ledger. Throughout the movie I transitioned from "when is this movie going to get good" to "when is this movie going to end."
Christian Bale is a fine actor and we were able to see his talents in the first installment. He had very few scenes where the audience could see these talents in this movie. He was regulated to the Batman Costume and his Clint Eastwood voice impersonation. This was unfortunate.
Heath Ledgers performance was good, but not award worthy. He kept sticking out his tongue while speaking to make his character look crazy. Gary Oldman has played much better bad guys in his day and Heath Ledgers performance does not match any of those or Jack's for that matter.
Maggie Gyllenhaal was fine but her role was so limited that they could have pulled all her scenes from the movie and the plot would not have skipped a beat. She is a fine actress but we did not get to see much of those talents in this movie.
Aaron Eckharts did an excellent job however his characters transformation into Two Face was rushed. It was kind of like they ran out of time and had to rush him into the bad guy role because they spent to much time elsewhere.
I will probably check out the third installment when the time comes, but I hope they get back to the format of the first movie. They let the the actors do the work in that version vice putting all the emphasis the superhero & bad guy characters. If they are not going to let Christian Bale act then they can put anybody into the batman suite and it will not matter. This installment is also getting to the borderline where far fetched gadgets are concerned.
It's unfortunate this movie made so much money as it will give the production team a false sense of accomplishment. If they repeat this performance they will bomb next time around unless they catch another break with another unfortunate off set tragedy.