an Awesome movie, but a few complaints

Rating: 9/10 (19 July 2008)

This movie totally had me until the last ten minutes... where I think they blew it.
Let's start with what I liked. The characterizations. First, you have Heath Ledger as the Joker. Very in line with the best of the Batman comics, such as Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight" and "The Killing Joke". He brings a manic energy to the character, as someone who could kill someone with the casualness of swatting a fly. He is a force of pure chaos, as devious as Jigsaw in the Saw movies. The traps he sets up for Batman are brilliant, a truly worthy opponent.
Michael Caine is awesome as Alfred. Alfred is Batman's conscience, what keeps him from going over to the dark side his adversaries inhabit.
Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon. They got it right. The Burton/Schumacher Batman movies never understood the importance of the character, but BB and TDK understand him perfectly. Morgan Freeman also did an awesome job as Lucius Fox.
Now we move on to where I don't have the warm fuzzies.
Maggie Glyenhall- Not as pretty as Katie Holmes, I really didn't connect with her character, and her demise didn't have the emotional impact it should have had because of it.
Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman- Not as strong as he was in the first movie, probably because he got overshadowed by all these other characters. Also, his vocal changes between Batman and Bruce Wayne, his Batman voice comes off as raspy. (In the animated series, Kevin Conroy had two completely different vocalizations for Wayne and Batman, and they worked.) Aaron Eckhardt as Harvy Dent/Two-Face. His performance as Dent is brilliant. When he transforms into Two-Face, it's less convincing. Also, the CGI they used strained credulity. He looked more like a decomposing zombie than a scarred supervillian.
Which brings me to the ending. I think everything was fine up until the point where Two-Face was holding Gordon's family hostage. Batman pushes Dent off the structure, and they both fall. Batman survives the fall but Two-Face dies? (Apparently?) So Gordon and Batman agree that Batman will get the blame for Two-Face's murders, so the memory of Harvey Dent will be kept alive.
Two-Face is probably Batman's second best villain (after the Joker). If anything, he deserved his own movie as the chief antagonist, instead of just being killed as an afterthought. Overall, I think this movie had too much stuff going on in it. It would take one or two viewings to take it all in.
Still, I recommend the movie.