Too many explosions, not enough Batman

Rating: 5/10 (31 July 2008)

Two hours after leaving the theater, I'm still not sure if I enjoyed The Dark Knight. It avoided coming across as overblown crap like the later "original "Batman movies did with Val Kilmer and George Clooney, so that was good. Heath Ledger as The Joker was entertaining to look at. I for one didn't miss the corny jokes that his character traditionally cracks. The make-up on Aaron Eckhart was superbly done and probably warranted a PG-13 rating in its own right.
Still, it felt more like a Die Hard movie without all the wisecracking: too many explosions, too much implausibility. It seems silly to pay money to see a movie about a billionaire who dresses up as a bat to defeat criminals and then complain that certain parts of it aren't believable, but the implausibility was too hard to ignore.
A lot of other reviewers have done an excellent job of cataloging the unbelievable moments, such as the suit that is vulnerable to dog bites but breaks falls from high buildings and The Joker being able to kill a guy with a pencil. For me, it was the larger problem of The Joker explaining that he likes creating chaos to strike fear in the hearts of "the planners" or something to that effect. It sounds like something a madman would say, and what is scarier than a madman who acts at random? The problem is, almost all of the Joker's evil deeds required an incredible amount of detailed planning and anticipating how the law enforcement would react, not to mention the amount of cooperation it would have taken to set up all the bombs in the buildings and boats.
That glaring contradiction made it a Not Quite Good film for me. Plus, even though it was really long, it seemed like Batman didn't do much except for get bitten by dogs and ride around on a crazy motorcycle that was part Transformer and part Tote Goat or some other contraption hunters use to haul dead animals back to camp. I think I managed to block out the part where the cell phones make Batman's eyes light up like he's in God mode in Doom II. That was just plain ridiculous. One other hang-up: it was hard not to think of No Country For Old Men every time there was a coin flip. Let's just say if you had to take a shot every time there was a coin flip, you'd be passed out with 30 minutes of movie left.
It wasn't a bad movie, especially factoring in that this is like the 6th Batman movie made in the last 20 years (how many other movies that are the 6th of anything could be considered remotely watchable?) Still, with all the hype, I thought that visually it would be on par with the Gothic look of Tim Burton's Batman. It wasn't.
My suggestion: see it in the theater, but make sure you aren't the one paying for your ticket (as I wasn't.) Your enjoyment of it will increase roughly 300% if you see it for free. Just don't give it ten stars on IMDb. It's not one of the 100 greatest movies or even 250 greatest movies. It's not even the greatest Batman movie.