A 10 for Heath Ledger, a 5 for everything else

Rating: 7/10 (13 July 2012)

Heath Ledger's Joker is the main reason why the first 90 minutes or so of this movie is so great. However, after an explosive action scene at that mark, the movie hits its climax, and then stumbles badly after that. Dark Knight is a movie that is about an hour too long. It has too many side plots, too many characters that we only marginally care about, and way too many outlandish and impossible Joker schemes. When I read all of the glowing reviews for this movie from both critics and fans alike, I am baffled by how these big problems have been overlooked. Maybe it was just the hype of Heath Ledger's performance and his tragic death. Whatever the reason, I think that in another 10-20 years, when people reflect on Christopher Nolan's career, this movie won't be thought of as highly as it is now.
As The Joker, Heath Ledger gives a performance for the ages. He kills and causes chaos, but you can tell that he's having fun doing it. He seems to be immune to fear, and even when his schemes are foiled, you can never tell whether it's because he has actually failed, or because he has something else up his sleeve. I can't believe that people even compare Jack Nicholson's performance in the original Tim Burton movie to what Heath Ledger does in this one. Jack Nicholson was just Jack Nicholson with some makeup, stupid dialog, and bad jokes. In "Dark Knight", Heath Ledger creates an entirely new take on the sociopathic criminal mastermind that fits in perfectly with Nolan's more realistic take on this series. Unlike Nicholson and all of the other criminals from the '80s and '90s Batman movies, you would never guess who this actor is without his name in the credits.
The Dark Knight opens up with one of the greatest crime scenes that I have ever seen. The Joker robs a bank with a gang of thugs, and brilliantly concocts a scheme whereby he gets away cleanly as the only survivor. The scene is suspenseful, with a streak of dark comedy. This is what I was hoping the entire movie would be like. Unfortunately, The Dark Knight is a slog when The Joker isn't on the screen. Perhaps the biggest problem with this movie is that it introduces numerous side plots and characters that should have been left on the cutting room floor. There is an utterly worthless and mostly unresolved side story of an unscrupulous accountant who threatens to reveal Batman's true identity. The movie leads you into thinking that it's going to be significant, but instead, it's just a waste of time. Batman kidnaps a mafia accountant, which provides some cool spectacle, but then goes nowhere. Worst of all though, is the introduction of a second villain at the 2/3 mark of the movie. It does nothing but unnecessarily complicate things and take away screen time from the two characters that we want to see the most. I haven't seen much of Aaron Eckhart before, but if this movie is any indication, he's a terrible actor. As Harvey Dent, his "angry and emotional" act was so bad, I thought that it was part of an act within the movie, and that a plot twist later would have him working with the Joker. I was wrong. It was just legitimately bad acting.
Some scenes drag on badly, as if Christopher Nolan doesn't trust you to understand what's going on without you getting beaten over the head with it. It's the same problem that he has with Inception. I can't give you much more detail than that without spoiling the movie, but I can tell you that I found myself looking at my watch at least a few times. Especially during the agonizingly long "explosives on the boats" scene.
In addition to a meandering plot and a script that should have gone through a couple more revisions, The Dark Knight features Joker schemes that grow increasingly implausible by the minute. The bank robbery scene at the beginning comes across as genius, but as the movie goes along, the crimes get more and more far-fetched. The movie goes out of its way to point out to you how The Joker works with mental patients and other crazy people, but he still pulls off some of the most ingeniously executed schemes of all time. By the time that this movie ended, I no longer thought of The Joker as a genius, but as a beneficiary of lazy script writing. The Joker's absurd schemes are a Deus Ex machine that Nolan uses to keep The Joker out of prison while endangering innocent civilians. I realize that it is a comic book movie, but this is supposed to be a gritty, "realistic" take on the genre. If you are going to have a monologue in which The Joker recalls a traumatic incident that he experienced as a child, don't turn around and enable him to rig up thousands of pounds of explosives at a hospital without anybody noticing.
After I saw this movie a second time, I watched "Batman Begins" for about the tenth time, and it is striking how much Nolan's work has deteriorated since then. Batman Begins has a much better script, with a much tighter story and a lot fewer scenes that should have been five minutes shorter. The Dark Knight is widely regarded as the better movie right now, but as time passes, I think that people will view it differently. With that said, I did enjoy a lot of it, but this movie is mediocre, at best, aside from Heath Ledger's performance.