Not as good as "The Dark Whopper"

Rating: 7/10 (15 August 2008)

So Dean and I headed to Forest Hill Weds night to watch "The Dark Knight". Here's my controversial review.
I'd been waiting to see this for a while, mostly because of how good "Batman Begins" was but also because of the rave reviews of Heath Ledger's performance, apparently his best since "10 Things I Hate About You". Went in expecting a truly classic cinematic performance...and i gotta say i was disappointed.
The film starts out with a gripping bank robbery, done by some blokes in Joker masks. I got all excited when i saw William Fichtner as the bank manager who looked like he was going to foil the robbery, but alas his impact was minimal and he was soon dead. After his performance in "Go", he shouldn't be taking crummy roles like that. Anyway we're soon shown the power and craziness of the Joker and his desire to be Gotham's master criminal. Yep, the Joker is chilling but in what will be an unpopular opinion, I reckon you could have put Screech from "Saved By The Bell" in that make up, with those lines, and be about 80% as terrified. We're then introduced to Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, in his best role since "Double Jeopardy") , the District Attorney with no fear and free from any ounce of corruption and Gordon (Gary Oldman, in his finest role since "Air Force One"), the squeaky clean cop who is hell-bent on bringing down the city's crime. The Joker realises he must take down Dent,Gordon, as well as Batman to take the city over and hatches a brilliant plan to do so. Will he succeed? See it to find out.
Now it was an OK movie, but way way over-hyped eg it's listed as No.3 on IMDb.com's all time best movie list. That puts it ahead of some pretty well known and respected movies ie Pulp Fiction, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Casablanca, Psycho and Taxi Driver just to name a few. I thought it was a decent script, with an excellent cast, but the film just got to clever for itself at times, or at least for a Batman movie. Having said that I missed one or two key moments of the movie, probably due to agitation more than anything else ie that Gordon was driving the van with Dent in the back. I just thought it was weird that the driver wasn't talking and must have been a baddie. It was way too long, at least by 30mins and didn't have enough Bruce Wayne time.
Solid, but I still prefer Batman Begins. Some will love it, some may think it was a tad overdone.
FInally, ledger's performance was good but let's not get carried away and put it up with DeNiro as Travis Bickle, Al Pacino as "Scarface", Anthony Hopkins as "Hannibal" or Keanu Reeves as "Johnny Utah".