Excellent superhero movie

Rating: 7/10 (24 July 2008)

Batman (Christian Bale) hits the streets again with his most famous foe, the Joker (Heath Ledger) as his foe. Where the first film in Nolan's new series expressed basically the problems with Batman's double life, this new film focuses (to whatever it extent the film can be said to have focus) on the effect that he has on the criminals themselves and the culture of "Gotham City." The most successful and surprising aspect of the film is the way that it truly makes the audience believe by the end that anything could happen (i.e. one of Gordon's kids could really die), as opposed to most superhero movies where the outcome eventually becomes obvious if not tedious. Ledger's performance is also a huge factor in the film's quality. He's really scary, not over the top at all in a bad way.
My problems with the film remain some of the same problems from "Batman Begins." I think Bale is sort of a dull Batman, primarily because he's not really convincing as Bruce Wayne. Specifically his version of Bruce Wayne is so cool and composed that it would seem obvious to everyone that he's Batman, whereas Michael Keaton for example seemed like such a doofus at times in the Bruce Wayne persona that you could believe that people would assume he was too much of a dilettante even if they did suspect him a bit. Believability is strained, even within the context of a superhero film, when Wayne slips away from his party and then moments later replaced by Batman, and yet nobody suspects.
One thing I also liked about the Burton films was that Nicholson's Joker was both funny and terrifying, whereas I noticed all the jokes that Nolan tried to pull with Ledger's Joker came off flat. The dark atmosphere of the film is so unrelenting that the audience does not really feel inclined to laugh, and that produces an effect that dulls the overall edge of the action scenes. I tend to prefer superhero films that take themselves less seriously, yet this one was so well done in its own style that I would actually rate it higher than "Iron Man" for example despite the fact that the latter was actually more my type of movie. You just can't ask me to take crimefighters in capes and armored suits seriously for 2 plus hours, but this movie actually came amazingly close.
Halfway through the movie I was thinking that it really wasn't any better than "Batman Begins" which I thought was somewhat mediocre, but then Ledger's performance really hits the high gear. I loved the dialog scene between Joker and Two-Face (Aaron Eckhart) in the hospital and the bit with him walking out. Also Batman and Joker in the interrogation room was a very strong scene. The really scary possibility that Ledger's performance raises is the possibility, perhaps only glimpsed, that the Joker might actually be more sane than Batman or even more sane than the average "civilized" person. "I'm just ahead of the curve" he says, and we almost want to believe him. These "supervillains" spring from essentially the fertile ground of Lon Chaney's performances in films such as "The Penalty" in 1919, where he was a legless criminal mastermind who wanted revenge on the entire city of San Francisco -- yet Ledger takes it to still another level by doing an irrational, anarchic take on the idea. He actually recites various versions of his invented "backstory" to his victims as if to mock their desire to contextualize his behavior through some rational explanation i.e. "my father beat me", "my mother didn't love me." The concept of revenge or even psychological compensation is just another joke to him. If indeed he is "insane", his ego will not allow him such a luxury and his very purpose seems to be to deny us the consolation of a rational or formulaic explanation for his brutality.
I wasn't disappointed with the film at all -- this is basically as good as this type of thing gets. It wasn't a truly great film like Nolan's "The Prestige", but I didn't really expect it to be. I did notice some of Nolan's trademarks like the repetition of certain sounds and images in different contexts. I'm very excited by the possibilities for Nolan's next couple movies because this one is such a big hit that he basically has a blank check.