Rides the edge, but doesn't fall off...

Rating: 8/10 (11 August 2008)

I, like many fans of superhero movies had grown to detest what had happened to the Batman series of films. The first one with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson is a classic...but the missteps began with the second one. There was no need to have two villains in one movie, both Danny Devito and Michelle Pfeiffer could have carried an entire film by themselves. Then of course came the almost cartoonish and ridiculous follow ups complete with one-liners from Arnold.
But I digress, "Batman Begins," was astounding...no doubt. I was very excited about "The Dark Knight" and finally went to see it.
This one was lighter on character development than the first one, which was a shame. Heath Ledger, however, saves the the day with his rendition of the Joker. Just based on his performance, I didn't mind that little was offered about his background.
I thought that Aaron Eckhart was being set up for a role as Two Face for film 3 (which would have been astounding), instead, they created him and killed him off in half a movie. So for awhile there are two villains at once and it brought back images of the last series. If anyone should have been killed off, it should have been the Joker...so that no one could spoil Ledger's rendition in a follow up, oh well, I'm not the director.
I respect Christian Bale, but somehow in this one some of his trademark additions to the character were a bit exaggerated...his deep raspy voice screaming in the face of evil-doers "where is she?" "where is he?" etc. became a bit grating after 5 or 6 iterations.
Equally, this one had many more explosions, outrageous chase sequences and other elements that were absent, for the most part, from the first...it really rode the edge, but like I said, it didn't fall off and become ridiculous.
One good example of the better reflection of reality in this series is that the girl dies. Batman is placed in the awkward situation of choosing to save one life versus another and instead of MAGICALLY saving both, one person dies and it is the one we least expected...well done! Thus overall I was satisfied and I highly recommend seeing it, but if "Batman Begins" was a 10, "The Dark Knight" is an 8 or 8.5.