Batman goes on, but never too far

Rating: 7/10 (26 July 2008)

Though not unsatisfying, in the end this latest instalment of the Batman saga fails to live up to the hype generated mostly by Heath Ledger's untimely death, and the general expectation of his delivering an epoch-making, fatal performance, the Joker being the agent of doom in the way the Requiem was for Mozart. Well, much like Mozart's Requiem, the performance is impressive, yet charged with mannerisms, and not as nuanced and masterly crafted as previous specimens of his art - Brokeback Mountain to name one. In a sense all the depth and menace of the Joker is plastered in his make-up and no acting can be much more menacing than that, a blurred manifesto of sick behaviour in which every option is simultaneously on display, a mask that would have incapacitated any actor to play with the range of fearful transitions from suavity to ferociousness that make Hopkins's Hannibal so memorable. And, as a villain, or better, as the purported incarnation of evil in its purest form - Chaos - the Joker is too evidently a monster to be really seductive and infectious, therefore there is no real interaction between him and the "goodies", who can only reject him entirely, even if in the war on terror they are forced to adopt draconian measures, blurring themselves the boundaries between good and evil. And here lies the major weakness of the movie: when loading a summer blockbuster based on a comic-book superhero with moral metaphors and statements on contemporary society one has to keep a balance between adult/thoughtful dialogue and its visual counterpart. Having deliberately refused to compete with other action movies on the grounds of choreographically elaborated fighting sequences, the Dark Knight needed a major dose of lethal fireworks: after all here more than anywhere else you have to see chaos at work. But this is something the morality of the director refuses to deliver: a hospital is blown but no one is injured - no carnage, no collective madness - and after the Joker disappears from the screen all excitement is gone, that is to say for the last thirty minutes. The transformation of Aaron Eckart's Harvey Dent into the promising new villain Two-Face is then totally wasted away, and he dies after having only just shot a corrupted cop and threatened to take revenge on the family of the actual culprit of many deaths; not very much for a final showdown, and quite a weak re-run of the metaphysical fight between good and evil.