extremely overrated,but still OK.

Rating: 8/10 (1 January 2009)

there may be spoilers. after reading all the comments on the internet about how great the dark knight was, i decided to give my own personal opinion about the movie. i have grown sick of all these people surrounding me boasting about how incredible the film is, and how it was a great pleasure just to see it. after hearing all this, i decided to see the dark knight and see if it lived up to all the credit it was getting.
the plot, when stripped down to the bare essentials, is just what is expected. there is a menace running around town causing trouble and its up to a guy dressed in a bat costume to stop him. thats all i really want to say about the movie, as when watching the movie, thats all i really cared about. the movie tried to fit in a bunch of sub-plots, such as batman trying to keep himself from going corrupt, Harvey dents transformation into 2-face, but in my opinion, these plots just made the film lag and made the movie more boring than it already was. i mean, when watching, who really cares what the police think of all the crime in the city(which was also one of the films many sub-plots)? when i began watching, i wanted to see one thing- joker destroying town and batmans attempts to stop him. thats what the trailer showed, thats what all the posters showed, thats what i wanted to see.
but before i start ranting, lets focus on what was good about the movie-good acting- all of the characters (excluding batman and Harvey dent) did a very believable job. great set design-the movie tries to be dark, and it succeeds.
but thats about it. mostly i found just complaints about the film. first off, lets complain about batman. Christian bale did a good job doing Bruce wayne, but he fell flat on his face doing batman. the voice he uses when playing batman (the scruffy voice, that sounds like he smokes 50 packs of cigarettes a day) was cool in batman begins, but in the dark knight it was just tiresome. i cringed every time batman spoke. next off, i was annoyed that batman sort went back-stage.joker became the main center-piece, while batman was reduced to sitting in a corner pretending to be the hero.
2nd off, the joker. now i know I'm going to get a lot of bashing for this, but heath ledger didn't really create a convincing joker. in my opinion, the joker was not that great of a villain. i mean, he did a great acting job, but his interpretation of the killing socio-path was not all that believable. i could not understand why everybody in the movie was so scared of him. i never felt frightened when he was on-screen. i never felt threatened. heath ledger should have done another villain. i know I'm talking about a different movie now, but take the 1989 version of batman. jack Nicholson did a much better version of the joker. his version is the way joker should be. when he was on the screen, he was so dementedly disturbing, so....vile that you couldn't help crapping your pants when he entered a room. jack did a version of joker that can still haunt people today. i know that heaths version would probably kill more people, but jacks is 10x more scary.especially with his cruel smile (shudders).
thirdly, the movie is utterly boring. i watched the movie 3 times, and i fell asleep 2 of the times. i have noticed here on IMDb that the dark knight is rated the greatest action movie of all time. when i read that, i felt like screaming WHAT THE HECK!!!!!!!!. the dark knight is sort of an action film, i suppose, but the action is really nothing special. i counted the action sequences in the movie, and there were 5. the first 3 can hardly be even called action. its all just batman jumping out of nowhere, laying a couple punches and jumping into the shadows again(which he seems to do often in the film). the 4th sequence is just the joker trying to kill Harvey dent, and batman chasing him on a bike and managing to flip over the jokers truck. its cool, but not worthy to be called action. only the last action sequence can be called action, and by that time, the movie has run so long that you just want it to end. i heard that the director filmed the action scenes using a special kind of camera, to make them more exciting. i really couldn't tell that the action was special in anyway.
in short, the movie is OK, but that is seriously all. its just......OK. if you are bored an afternoon, go rent it, but don't expect the greatest movie all time, as everybody is saying nowadays. those who say that should actually watch some of the greatest movies of all time, such as the godfather,raiders of the lost ark,pulp fiction, the shawshank redemption,etc, and then say with a straight face the dark knight is amazing.
p.s- by the way, jokers magic pencil trick was not anything special either.