The Joker is Real

Rating: 9/10 (18 July 2008)

Watching the various Batman incarnations over the years, from the Adam West era, through the Superfriends, Tim Burton and Friends, and the very excellent Bruce Timm Batman: The Animated Series of the 1990s, we are faced with various versions of the Joker.
The Animated Series Joker was voiced by Mark Hamill, and is considered by many fans to be the best Joker up to now. He certainly is creepy, and in the film spin-offs he does actually murder people explicitly on occasion, but though he is good it's hard to imagine him existing outside of the art deco alternate universe of Bruce Timm. He's just not unpredictable enough. He has steady henchmen who trust him enough to turn their backs on him.
Jack Nicholson's Joker was well-received at the time, but he too suffered from a believability gap, in addition to being over the top and, while crazy, not quite creepy.
Enter the Dark Knight's Heath Ledger: the freak make-up, the crazy, but disturbingly lucid philosophy, the complete lack of empathy for other people, and the scary practice of killing people for fun and without warning, his fondness for knives. I can actually imagine running into a character like this in a city somewhere. Certainly, not quite as complete, the real-life version wouldn't have the smarts to pull off so many grand schemes along with all the pure evil traits (you hope), but there are a small number of people out there who share some of the Joker's characteristics, and that's what makes Ledger's character so creepy, so scary.
Every scene he is in, accompanied by music that would feel at home in any Hitchcock or horror film, is filled with a sense of tension and dread. What horror will he next bring upon the people standing before him? Who's next? Without a doubt the best Joker ever, Ledger's performance did not feel at all like a comic book superhero movie bad guy. I was thinking more like Hannibal Lechtur. Intelligent, lucid, menacing, and, I'm convinced, not really insane, but horribly sane, with a tendency to view life as pointless and thus amusing.
Oh, yeah, the rest of the movie? That was good, too. Eckhart's Harvey Dent was also very satisfying, with no campiness to bring it down. His trajectory from ace prosecutor to criminal Two-Face is very well-done. Bale, Caine, Oldman, Freeman, and Gyllenhall are all well-cast. The action is better than Batman Begins, with the fistfight scenes in particular being easier on the eyes, with less spastic camera motion. The writing and direction is more along the lines of a crime drama or an action film than a comic book adaptation, and the story starts off with action and keeps you going for the whole 2.5 hours.
Very dark, violent, and very well-done film all around.