Eventually disappears up[ its own batcave

Rating: 1/10 (4 March 2009)

I'm not going to comment on individual performances or technical aspects, these are covered elsewhere. What made TDK a disappointment for me was the loss of story halfway through. In the beginning, there are enough coherent scenes, strong supporting cast and even flashes of brilliance to tempt you into sticking with this latest episode in the comic-book-as-film-noir franchise, but TDK loses any sense of scale.
The story leaves you high and dry; it loses any relation it had to an engaging story of complex supeheroes and Ã¼bervillains, and becomes an unnecessarily complicated, overwrought, overstuffed mess. The film becomes like a nightmare fairground, where all the sideshows are at full volume, in your face, and all of them drowning each other out, in the hope that you won't notice that none of them are very interesting at all. Just like that mobile phone multiscreen towards the long-distant end, which doesn't make sense as a plot device, as a technical gizmo, or as anything that one operator could make head ot tail of. Minority Report had a similar imaginary device that looked believable: this wasn't, even in the post-Luc-Besson design world TDK is supposed to inhabit.
The point where TDK quite literally loses the plot is when DA Dent is switched to become Two-Face, which would naturally be the point where you would expect the movie to end - except that the Joker isn't anywhere near being dealt with at that point: so TDK has to carry on with a completely new villain in order to resolve the story of the old villain - and it doesn't do that properly either.
In all, TDK is like half a good film with a bad one tacked on the end, loaded with flashes and bangs in the hope you won't notice.