Breathless

Rating: 8/10 (24 July 2008)

This was a relief to me, after the incoherent disaster of "Batman Begins". Nolan has found a way to get this series into a regular orbit; that is, it seizes on an ironic tone and revolves around it.
The value doesn't rely on any sense of originality; you can see how this Gotham is inhabited by "Spider-Man"-type smart elites and dumb proletarians. The videotaped terrorist messages suggest those from "Robocop 2" (an interesting study all in itself), and so on. But the borrowings are OK this time, because Nolan's using a shorthand that we recognize and fits within, rather than works against, what he's doing.
And it's overplotted, but that's nothing new from the summer movie genre. If anything, it's an advantage in the pacing of the second half of the film...we build and build tension with the music score and the action to a precipice, then...satisfaction with release. That takes editing skill.
Because of Ledger's performance, there's going to be a mystique surrounding this film for some time to come...poor Heath took a trip straight into the asylum and never came back out; and with Bale's own current legal problems, viewers and fans will get the sense of a risqué edge to being associated with this, in a way, analogous to the air that surrounded "Poltergeist" for years. Nicholson's Joker worked within Burton's sense of camp...here, Ledger serves the purpose of giving voice to Nolan-as-writer, the prime mover who operates by his own rules -- "no rules".
The best movie ever made? No. But a step above most DC comics material, without the preening of the Marvel movies. Worth a look, if only to have some perverse fun tagging along with the Joker.