New Dawn Fades

Rating: 6/10 (22 August 2008)

I thought "Batman Begins" was the best Batman movie of them all when I saw it and I still think that. It was the first Batman movie to fully explore how Bruce Wayne became Batman by showing his training by a mentor (Liam Neeson) and it made you fully appreciate what he was trying to achieve by turning fear back on the evil-doers. Even without the big Batman villains of The Joker, The Penguin and Catwoman, the makers of "Batman Begins" managed to do something new and different with an old character. It ended with a reference to the arrival of The Joker in Gotham City and it set the pulses racing with anticipation.
Heath Ledger's casting as The Joker did raise some eyebrows, he wasn't an obvious choice and hadn't previously shown any of the manic energy necessary to play the Clown Prince of Gotham. While the calls (or demands more like) for an Oscar for Heath Ledger for his performance here are stretching things, he does bring an interesting energy to the performance. Jack Nicholson really nailed the character of The Joker, so it was going to be hard for anyone to live up to that. I guess Ledger did as good as anyone could have expected.
The action scenes in "The Dark Knight" are spectacular and they are the best thing about the film. The real problem is the script. Christopher Nolan brought his brother on board as screenwriter, he hadn't been involved in the first film and it shows. The script is too long, we could have easily done without Harvey Dent/Two-Face in it (although the make-up effects on this character are excellent). If you cut his character out, you'd have a much more streamlined movie.
Heath Ledger was never a comic actor and Christopher Nolan's movies aren't known for their humour either and that's another problem here. The Joker's funniest scenes are in the hospital when he goes to visit Harvey Dent. Dressed up as a nurse with a red wig, the only dialogue the writers can think of for The Joker to say is: "Hi." (Couldn't they have thought of something funnier than that?) Then, when the Joker blows up the hospital by remote control detonation, you keep waiting for the funny lines to come, but they never do. There are constant silences where there should be one-liners. Jack Nicholson had some tremendous quips as The Joker in Tim Burton's "Batman," Heath Ledger never really gets the same service from the screenwriters. That's a pity.
After 9/11, many new security measures were brought in and some of them lead to protests about invasion of people's privacy. There is a scene is this movie that mirrors that when Batman uses the cellular phones of the people of Gotham to track The Joker through sonar (it's also the visual equivalent of the hallucogenic scenes at the end of "Batman Begins"). Morgan Freeman's character, Lucius Fox, proffers his resignation rather than "spy on 30 million people." It's a clever scene and it elevates The Joker's attacks on Gotham into a context we can all relate to, unfortunately it's only a brief moment in a very long movie and the rest of the film isn't as clever.
Christian Bale seems to be growling his lines even more as Batman here than he did in the first film and it does get a little irritating at times. He's also not as buffed up as he was in the first one. The character development of Bruce Wayne that was so interesting in the first one grinds to a halt in this film. We find out precious little about him here, that goes for The Joker too and I feel the film suffers as result.
Michael Caine returns as Alfred, but he doesn't have much to do this time around. The same goes for Morgan Freeman. The cast doesn't feel as special this time even though it's the same people all over again.
Overall, this doesn't have the tight structure of "Batman Begins", it feels bloated and could have been fixed. It's just one robbery, kidnapping or car chase after another and it does start to get repetitive after a while. I hope the next Batman sequel is more in line with "Batman Begins" than this one.