Disappointing

Rating: 3/10 (29 July 2008)

Advance said it was darker than "Begins". I'd say bleak was more the tone. Certainly the Joker was much more psychotic than Nicholsons', which was the clearly the intent of the producers, so I guess if you see that as reality, it works; this is a comic book, so how real can it be? But the psychological monologues by Ledger got to be rather tedious. Not that he didn't deliver them well, sort of a modern day Hamlet musings, but without the clever word play. But after one or two, we got the point, he was a murderous psycho, I don't think we needed it drummed into us. Compared to Hopkins Lecter, or Perkins Psycho it was pale. If Ledger had not unfortunately died, I don't think you'd have had the adulation that's been bestowed on his performance.
And Dent this "white knight", this hero that Gotham so desperately needs, suddenly becomes a psychopathic murderer because the Joker spends 5 minutes with him and one of his psycho monologues; a bit hard to swallow. And rather than take the memory of this beacon of hope from Gotham, Batman takes the rap for Dents killings. Please, why? Easily explained by his own terrible lose, why would that shatter Gothams hopes? And Dents Two-Face was like a T1 in flesh. Amazing how muscles can still work with no blood supply.
But the real killer for me was the explosives on the ferries. After the Joker threatens to bomb the bridges/tunnels out of Gotham, no one on the police force thinks to check the ferries for bombs? A blind man would have noticed the dozens of 55 gallon drums of fuel oil and fertilizer aboard each ferry. To get all these on board, the Joker would have had to have an army of helpers and no one noticed? This was as dumb a storyline as you'd find in an Ed Wood film.
On the plus side the action was good. Fight scenes were hard to follow as it seem like they mounted the camera on an actors arm, but the special effects were good.