I guess it had its moments

Rating: 4/10 (10 March 2009)

I am sincerely confused by all the hype around this movie. It just didn't seem that great to me. No characters had any personality or motivation whatsoever, except the Joker. There was no plot structure at all... the entire thing was just the Joker threatening to kill people and everybody freaking out, then repeat, then repeat again. No break in the action, no climax. And all this for at least two hours. By the end I was TRYING to fall asleep.
Not to mention the really, really stupid plot devices. (If you don't care to hear my rant/list of these, which may include SPOILERS, skip to the next paragraph!) Being able to remotely transform all cellphones into high-resolution sonar devices? This idea is just stupid. Wayne chooses "taking a boat ride with the entire Russian ballet" as an alibi? Because somehow he trusts all these near-strangers enough not to blow his cover? That entire plot device was clearly an excuse to fit in at least one scene with scantily-clad women. And the Joker escapes from jail because they didn't bother to put his handcuffs back on after Batman took them off. How lame is that? As soon as he got into jail it was obvious he'd escape, because that's how these stereotypical plots always go, but I at least hoped it would be because of Joker's cleverness rather than because of a completely unrealistic and inexplicable lack of security. He was an infamously dangerous criminal, obviously an entire police station wouldn't be so lax around him. And when he holds his knife to an officer's neck to make demands, another officer about ten feet away is pointing a gun and has a clear shot at his head, and a reason to shoot, but he doesn't. Why not? This movie follows SO many other predictable plot stereotypes. Like the fact that as SOON as Harvey is disfigured, it's completely obvious that he is going to become a villain. Because you can't be disfigured without being evil... Only the handsomest of men are heroes. The most annoying thing is how they didn't even feel the need to explain his lighting-quick transition to being a supervillain with no convincing motivation except for showing his burns, because as soon as you saw that his face was burned you just knew he was evil, end of story. It's just like the way that as soon as you see a child in this movie, you KNOW that group of people won't die, because children never die, of course. The audience might be offended. Also, both protagonists are totally infatuated with some boring girl for no apparent reason, which is a pretty good sign that a movie isn't very thoughtful.
Some of the ridiculousness and predictability of the movie's plot could have been forgiven if it wasn't so very tedious. Two hours of the exact same continuous action sequence with no breaks to allow for deeper plot or character development is just too much. Unless you like watching violence for its own sake regardless of plot, and have a really, really long attention span, I can't understand why you like this movie (and you probably do, everyone does, apparently). Not to mention that this long tedious action sequence mostly consists of the exact plot of the first half being reused as the second half (Joker's setup on the boat and the hospital were the same story, it's as if they couldn't decide which one to use and then thought "hey, let's make this movie REALLY long and just use both of them, one right after the other...").
It did have some redeeming qualities. The joker WAS great, the nihilistic spin on his character was well-done. The beginning was relatively interesting, before they got into the repetitive action sequences. And toward the end they killed someone who I really didn't predict would die. But, I would never, EVER sit through this again.