Really doesn't know what it wants to be.......

Rating: 4/10 (18 August 2008)

Being a Libertarian wherein one debates the proper time and place for Force, dismayed at the level of government interference in people's lives, but also willing to do what is necessary to survive through defensive forms of Force, this movie does provide fodder for thought. Also, as a believer to some degree in the theories of French Absurdism as an avenue to proto-nihilistic philosophies I can perhaps understand that real life does not some up to an easily digestible whole, but a movie that is primarily entertainment should take you to some endpoint intellectually.
Does the prior paragraph make much sense? To initiates, it probably does, for people looking for some action and a bag of popcorn maybe not. And that's the problem for TDK for me. It purports to be one thing, executes something much different, and become unsatisfying as either. If I'm in the mood for a shoot'em up popcorn movie, I'd like a little complexity, sure, but I want the good guys to be good guys and bad guys dead. If I'm looking for a treatise on the absurdity of life and also how man wrapped up in fear, real or imagined, will resort to all sorts of Force that is misplaced and misused, I'll watch something else. I can even at least see a movie that leaves you hanging quite a bit as the use of Art to prove a point, not only as the message but the medium as well. But I certainly don't want an examination of existentialism bound up with my popcorn movie. It just ends being a waste of two and half hours.
Basically TDK can't be both a pleasant diversion and a deep philosophical movie about the death penalty, righteous Force, blind fear of the masses, thugacracy, and even more. A movie that has fast action fight scenes, with breaking bones and baddies being dumped over railings to some unknown end, a movie that maintains its limited view of action and consequence (like these baddies being taken off to a hospital for care or some such instead of being simply gone) and yet be a piece to evoke philosophical debate. Basically it can't have its cake and eat it too.
The movie basically creates a character of pure nihilism in the Joker and then doesn't know what to do with it. What point is trying to be made? It almost seems the creative team didn't know either, or nothing they'd admit to. So I don't mind being philosophically open ended, but such doesn't in any way make for a satisfying action movie. And yet it still pandered to the action movie template far too often to believe that it was a serious philosophical movie.
Basically it was a mess that more or less wasted two and a half hours.