good but overrated

Rating: 7/10 (21 July 2008)

I wanted to love this film. I hoped it would live up to the hype. I feel it does not. It is a solid film, ambitious and serious. Maybe too serious. Most of it are chaotic chases and fights or serious, somber talk about politics and commitment. Almost entire film is in the urban dark surroundings, literally dark, which is a lot to take in a very long movie. And too much Republican agenda for my liking, characters say it has to be worse before it gets better, u should endure a period of unpopularity, u stand for more important things than the public image, there are guys who do not follow logic, they just want to see the world burn, vigilantism is a price of freedom etc. One might think this Batman is, ehm, George W., Joker is Bin Laden and Gotham is America. Too much in a film about a guy in a plastic suit with two protruding ears who can fly, chasing a megalomaniac made up like a clown. A maniac that defies realism too, being able to be in many places at will, move around secretly tons of explosives etc. For a movie that takes itself that serious the transition of Dent into TwoFace is simplistic and shallow. Of course he fails to shoot the little blond boy because Batman intervenes at the last moment. It was a scene like from Peter Pan movie. And Batman has to beat Joker up to get the whereabouts of kidnapped Dent and his girlfriend but on two other occasions he knows where Dent is, just to intervene in time. For me the music was the only stand out, on its own keeping the adrenaline up.