I'll tell you why so serious

Rating: 3/10 (4 August 2008)

I'm pretty serious about this one because I love movies. And since this movie is being rated as the best movie of all time, I was expecting something that could measure itself with the great movies of all time. I expected a movie that grips you, crawls under your skin and leaves you breathless. It does none of that. It is pretentious and inconsistent. It pretends to dig deep and dark and explore themes like morality, fate, good versus evil, heart versus mind, madness versus reason, and at the same time it wants to be this big spectacular action movie. But it fails miserably. It's all just a big clumsy pretentious inconsistent mess.
Yes, Ledger is good, but for his performance to really contribute to the movie, there should have been context. If the rest just doesn't feel right, it looses its potential. If you throw a diamond on a mountain of poop, it doesn't change much of the way it looks or smells. Love interest Maggie Gyllenhaal (great performance in Stranger than Fiction) produces no chemistry at all, so I wasn't really blown away when she was blown up. Editing feels weird. But most of all it was the inconsistencies that got to me. And then not just the 'practical' ones (like the inconsistent protective quality of the batman suit; or why leave an extremely dangerous criminal unrestrained with a tubby policeman in his cell ('hostage volunteer? you, tubby?'); a schoolbus is used twice to make a grand escape? - do they come with teleporter machines these days?; why would you want to ride your batmobile face down?; Batman lowers his voice to be unrecognizable, but how hard is it to follow a batmobile with a helicopter to its hiding place?), but more importantly it's crucial plot/ morality inconsistencies. Yes, the White Knight went through some traumatic experiences, but to turn to the dark side so wholeheartedly and sadistically? And then to just let the Joker (at least indirectly responsible for his trauma) walk when he only needs to pull the trigger? Oh yeah, forgot, he's Mr. Coin Toss now. But even if he is guided by blind fate now, he still determines himself who he goes after and whether it's OK to threaten to blow out the brains of little kids. And then the Big Bad criminal who throws the detonator out off the window. Ah! The Joke is on you Joker! People are not what you make them out to be. Even the baddest bad ass has a good heart. Never mind that just before when the Joker threatened to blow up a hospital unless an innocent lawyer was killed, there was a crowd with guns ready to shoot the guy within no time. Also, what with the vote on the 'good people boat'? They vote to blow up the 'bad people' (democracy at its finest) but then Nobody has the balls to do it? So they don't blow up the other boat because they think it's unjust, but because they're spineless hypocrites.
I applaud movies that try and deal with complex issues like conflicting emotions or morals, but to just make a big soup of it all under the pretense of 'but that's how life works, it's conflicting ideas, feelings and actions' is just a weak excuse for the inability or laziness to produce a good consistent story. Believe me, I detest black and white thinking and applaud the exploration of the Grey area. But that's not what this movie does. Piling a bunch of random inconsistent ideas on top of each other is not equal to exploring the Grey area.
The climax is the ending though (it usually is). Our dark knight has to sacrifice himself, has to live like a hunted animal in the shadow, because the People would not be able to cope with the idea of Denth doing bad things, despite his recent traumas. So it's better to LIE to the public, because they are too stupid to make up their own mind and their faith in goodness of man would be lost forever (despite the fact that they just tried to establish with the boat-thing that there's goodness even in big bad criminals). So Batman (whose enemies take advantage of the fact that he doesn't kill) takes the blame for a bunch of random killings that could have been linked to anyone - a Joker perhaps? (even if they wanted to absolve Denth from his crimes -I mean, evidence/motive would have been needed to link it to Batman too?) and goes off running ('run Forrest!') into the night to save us another day. Because you just can't trust people to make up their own mind, it's better to lie to them. It's for their own good. Great morale. Straight from the White House? But ey, why so serious?