A Good Adventure But Falls Back on Greatness

Rating: 6/10 (16 June 2009)

The main highlights of this dismal, dark isolated atmospheric superhero adventure movie is the Joker's (Heath Ledger) appearances the climactic special effects like the explosions and the believable dark clouds that surround this dreary, but riveting blockbuster. According to demographics, the majority of the audience who went to see "The Dark Knight" are 85% males between 18-35 who's minds are fixated on video games. And that is a non-surprising statistic.
With the exception of Ledger's stunning performance, this movie fails to carry out its promise in gathering our interest in watching the good usurp the forces of evil, almost to the point where we take more sympathy for the evil Joker than the dark hero himself, Batman(Christian Bale).
Bruce Wayne comes on to me as philandering playboy and his portrayal is thinner than a Ritz cracker. His envy and rage over the new female D.A. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is more juvenile in personality without any sign of emotion at all. Even when they embrace in that fatal kiss, it's more manipulative than inspiring.
Batman's robotic voice and stoic expressions convinces the audience into thinking, is that a man or a cyborg? This pedestrian performance may give the audience the impression that this movie was never meant for adults to watch.
The anger and rage manifested in the Joker's soul has some spark of appeal and sorrow, but the schtick eventually become monotonous after a while that it becomes tiring after a while. The final scenes in the movie has very little excitement that afterwords people started to slowly trickle out of the cinema disappointed because of the set-up. It was just pure banal.
Though it's not the worst movie in the world, it's still very over-rated in the end. The real standout was the Clown Prince of Evil himself the Joker. But even he couldn't save this movie himself. He wasn't getting any real help from his co-stars. But if you are those who just want to watch the movies just to see Heath Ledger one last time? Well the more power to you, but you really shouldn't do that on account of someone's unfortunate premature death.