Kill The Actor

Rating: 1/10 (2 April 2009)

I think its adorable that certain members of an unspecified generation find "The Dark Knight" (aka Batman 2) to be a Masterpiece of Contemporary Cinema. Is 'adorable' the right word?
Christian Bale reprises his role as the humorless comic-book hero and Heath Ledger joins the cast as the humorless comic-book villain ironically named "Joker." Ledger's "Joker" is about as much fun as an emergency spleenectomy, which means to say he never laughs, never makes anyone laugh, and never jokes. Are we having fun yet?
The film takes place in the same Gotham City from the previous film: flat, bleak, black, dark, foreboding, menacing, pessimistic, intense, sinister, colorless, numb, petrified... is this the fun part? Bale- an otherwise fascinating actor- manages to create a black hole as both Bruce Wayne AND Batman, leaving the audience without any protagonist for whom to cheer. Christopher Nolan's solemn direction is the same as in the first- he's working so hard to convince us that all of this is ABSOLUTELY REAL that there is no chance for any fun. Fun in a superhero movie? I must be out of my mind.
What's sad is that poor Heath Ledger took the role of Actual Psychotic so seriously that it contributed to the man's death. No film role is worth your life, and if playing the villain in a comic book movie messes with your mind, you're doing it wrong. No offense to the late actor- whose performance here would have been great in a dramatic or psychological film- but Jack Nicholson nailed The Joker in '89. It was nice of the Academy to give Ledger the posthumous Oscar, but I think we all would have preferred he not die before his time.
This is not to say the movie is terrible... it's still an above-average action flick with some nice moments: the sunset prison transfer is beautifully done and the scenes at Wayne's cocktail party border on subversive, but the generally dour approach to the popcorn-flick leaves me depressed, and I can't help returning to the thought that a man gave his life for this...
Maybe that's what certain members of an unspecified generation want... maybe the Imagination is so damaged they don't believe a movie character is killed unless an actor really dies. I find the death of creative thought rather frightening, and I keep coming back to an old horror catchphrase:
"It's only a movie, It's only a movie..."
GRADE: C