Run-of-the-mill superhero movie with big pretensions

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 2009)

Batman raises the stakes in his bourgeois war on crime. With the help of Lieutenant Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman sets out to dismantle the remaining criminal organizations that plague the city streets. The partnership proves to be effective, but they soon find themselves prey to a reign of chaos unleashed by a rising criminal mastermind known to the terrified citizens of Gotham as The Joker... The Dark Knight is nothing more then an average super hero movie. I find it to be completely overrated and I couldn't disagree more with those who consider this to be worthy of the top250 IMDb list. First of all, after a while, the story gets boring and dull because there's too much politics and bureaucracy involved, and it's not that I don't enjoy a rich plot, it's just that it all seems very contrived and pointless and it drags out way too long. They injected a lot of philosophical questions and moral dilemmas in an attempt to diverge a little from the usual cut and dry, straight-forward superhero movie but, they should've sticked to what the genre usually offers, entertainment and action, because the end product is a very uneven piece of work. The actions scenes were disappointing mainly because of the editing and successive cuts that make it hard to really see what's going on, this happens particularly in the fighting sequences. Now, regarding the acting, I did enjoy Ledger's portrayal of The Joker, but I think it's miles away from being an Oscar-worthy performance and I'm sure his tragic death contributed to his winning, at least to a certain extent. Christian Bale, wasn't exactly bad either but, his cold and distant Bruce Wayne could never compete with Robert Downey Jr's witty and sarcastic Tony Stark for instance. Obviously the two movies have different tones, but the point I'm making is, Bale lacks charisma. Aaron Eckhart was fine as Harvey-Dent; what really threw me off was the fact that his character went from being incorruptible to killing innocent people without so much as a twitch ,all this because his lover, Rachel Dawes, gets killed. This is poor and incoherent writing. Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Michael Caine have minor roles and aren't worth mentioning. It's really something, the level of hype around this film, and the favored public reaction, the thing is, The Dark Knight doesn't know what it wants to be and tries to hard, sometimes it's a comic adaptation, and then it turns into a deep philosophical exercise and things don't work that way. It lacks coherence and a strong screenplay.
5/10