Extremely Overrated...

Rating: 6/10 (29 June 2009)

OK, I know my opinion may not be the most popular, but after recently watching the Dark Knight again, I am forced to air my grievances with this highly overrated, nonsensical farce of a film. It can certainly be entertaining, and Heath Ledger turned in an above average performance, for sure, but that is pretty much all this film has going for it. The plot has some gaping holes, the characters are paper-thin, the acting is atrocious, the writing falls flat, and the whole thing is entirely inconsistent.
To unpack this a bit -- let's start with some of the glaring plot holes. The most noticeable one is right after the Joker crashes Bruce Wayne's little get together, and Batman jumps out the window after Rachel Dawes. OK, he got Dent out of sight and he rescued the girl, but what about the murderous villains that are still in his home threatening all of his guests? There is not even an attempt to explain this. Then there is the Joker's fortuitous luck -- he was expecting that robber to be standing in just the right spot to get hit by the bus? How does he escape from jail all of those times? He escapes by setting off a bomb? We see a shot of an explosion and then we see the Joker cruising down the street in a cop car. What? The whole Gordon faking his death thing is ludicrous, topped off by Gordon being in exactly the right place to put the shotgun to the Joker's head. Batman taking the blame at the end of the movie is also absurd -- Dent murdered 5 prominent people and Batman thinks that there will be no evidence at any crime scene to link them to Dent? I could keep going, but I think you get my point.
As mentioned before, the characters are all paper thin, which was perfectly acceptable in the 1989 rendition of Batman, which was set in an entirely fictional world. The biggest problem here is that Christopher Nolan takes the same one dimensional characters and throws them into a realistic setting, making them much harder to swallow.
I don't have much to say about the acting other than the fact that it made me die a little bit inside to see Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Gary Oldman turn in such awful performances. I did not expect much from the likes of Christian Bale, but I was positively shocked to see Morgan Freeman play such a flat, uninteresting role. Heath Ledger was certainly good, but I would have a hard time going so far as to call the performance great. If you want to see great, go pick up the Silence of the Lambs and watch Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, that is a great performance. Heath Ledger's Joker was good, but very far from great.
Oh and as a side note: what is the time frame for the events of this film? A month? A year? It really seems like a random string of events, there is no sense of time passing or any sort of real things happening whatsoever. Again, in a less realistic setting (Tim Burton's Batman), this becomes irrelevant, but it is very important in a real world sort of setting as we see in the Dark Knight.
All in all, this film was extremely inconsistent and entirely overrated. I would recommend that anyone who thinks that this movie was intelligent go out and rent 2001, the Godfather, and the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and then compare them to this solid-gold turd.