How do you hate the Greatest Film Ever Made?

Rating: 6/10 (28 July 2008)

When the Joker showed up at Wayne's fundraiser for Harvey Dent, my tentative rating was at an 8.5. I was thoroughly enjoying myself, and was having it go mano-a-mano with my all-time favorite superhero movie, Spider-Man 2. By the time Batman swerved around the Joker on his motorcycle, I was getting a little restless, a 7.5 maybe, and set the score around 7.5 or so; still liked the film, and was pleased that at least I was going to give it a positive grade, to spare myself the hassle. By the time Harvey Dent was chillin' in a warehouse with ol' Jim, I was rooting for Batman to die if only to end the film more quickly.
There is a good film in here. Hell, there's a GREAT film in here, but my god, to humanize this film is to implore it to do a few crunches. The Dark Knight is hideously, mindbogglingly, monstrously overlong. Every source physical and electronic had informed me that the time FLEW by that it may have lasted two hours and thirty-two minutes, but it sure as hell didn't feel like it. Well, they're right. It DIDN'T feel like two hours and thirty-two minutes. It felt like three. By the time Dent got his faced burned, I was glad that it was finally wrapping up, because it had gone on a bit too long at that point. The HOUR that it spent unnecessarily wrapping up plot strands after that scene was what killed the film for me.
There was definitely a lot to like here. In a superhero film, the constant is the hero, the variable, and thus, the definition of quality, is in the villain. The Joker is the best of the Batman villains because he's the most colorful, and yet the most terrifyingly plausible. He embodies things we fear on a fundamental level: People who hide their identity,in masks and grotesque makeup, who are unhinged, who can and will do anything on a whim. Where other villains include a poof who tells riddles and a man raised by penguins sewer (don't worry about correcting me if I got that wrong, I don't care), the Joker seems horrifyingly impervious to scrutiny.
In the acting department, I had surprisingly little problem with Bale. He seemed less brooding and more personable, more lively than I had seen him. When he put on his scaaawy voice, my entire theater chuckled, but I understood what he was trying to do; it far more real and acceptable than before. As for the rest of the cast, Ledger did a good job, but by the halfway point, I grew tired of the film treating him as an go-to gag machine. The longer we sat with him, I saw him descend from Jerry Brudos into Jerry Lewis. People seem to overestimate the difficulty in playing a crazy person. Talk with a funny voice, affect a little walk, invent a couple of mannerisms, it's really all in the definition. The entire film, I was thinking: You know who could have been fabulous at this role? Andy Dick. Seriously, Ledger's put-on voice sounded almost exactly like Dick's normal voice, and there's a built-in hatred for the man anyway, what better way to immediately cultivate a visceral audience reaction? I think he could have done a fine job. Aaron Eckhart, on the other hand, was quite poor. He had the chiseled chin, and I know the man can act, but here he just seemed out of his element. Far too often, I saw Aaron Eckhart acting when I should have seen Harvey Dent speaking. As for positives, I thought Maggie Gyllenhall was a tremendous upgrade on Katie Holmes. She infused the character with dimensions and life, and she convinced me every second she was on screen. Michael Caine also did a fine job, and I want to give a mention to Eric Roberts, who I thought stained the screen with the sleaze emitting from his body in his meager calls to set. Most of the rest of the cast had little to do, although I was still lamenting that, as good as job as he did on the good side, possibly the great go-to villain actor of the last generation will never be given a chance to enliven a Batman villain.
Batman Begins, which I gave a 6/10, ran 2:20. I don't remember feeling it was overlong, just sort of lame. While, The Dark Knight is as far from lame as you can get, but that other problem reared its ugly had and caused me far more pain that the immediate fizzle of its predecessor, because it had so much going for it, and it seemed to have squandered it with a wasted hour that did NOTHING NEW for the characters. Did anything that important happen in the final hour of the film that hadn't happened at least once beforehand? And every new thing they did introduced was so labored and obvious that it was just as much of a time waster as everything else.
The word, more than any other, that I want to use for my opinion towards this film is "lament". I wanted to LOVE this film, to be greeted with open arms by my electronic peers into their cool, hip club that apparently numbers in the billions. And my initiation was all set. Bruce, Chris & I had passed several hurdles, several tests, on our way to being accepted together, hand-in-hand, brothers in arms. But like Harvey Dent's infamous coin, the game was rigged. They flipped it until we failed, and fall flat on our faces we did. Or at least, I did. We took part in a five-legged race, and they persevered while I got stuck with the shackles, and that's too bad. The finish line was in site, but they kept moving it back, and all I taste is dirt.
{Grade: 6.25/10 (C+) / #16 (of 60) of 2008}