Do not go gentle into that good knight...

Rating: 10/10 (13 September 2008)

If Batman is the untamed world, The Joker is the unbalanced world. THE DARK KNIGHT tells us humanity lives somewhere in between.
In Christopher Nolan's sequel to BATMAN BEGINS, we hit the ground running, cape flouncing dramatically, cowl turned sideways so we can only see through one eye-hole; claustrophobic scream rising as Gotham City is terrorized by The Joker, while the Batman, Commissioner Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent join forces to stop him at the cost of lives, ethics, reputations... as simple as this outline reads, director-writer Nolan and co-writer, Jonathan Nolan, have elevated this comic book tale to tragedy on an operatic scale.
Christian Bale is once again Batman/Bruce Wayne, all muscled arms and intense quietude; Michael Caine, his loyal butler, Alfred; Morgan Freeman is technocrat Lucius Fox, who delineates the ethics slur that Batman commits (a grave nod to the Amerikan FISA bill); mighty Gary Oldman is Commissioner Gordon; hourglass Maggie Gyllenhaal thankfully replaces dull Katie Holmes as Assistant D.A., Rachel Dawes; Aaron Eckhart makes a killer Harvey Dent, tragically transmogrified into Two-Face; and - let me do that Hannibal Lecter thing when he talks about Chianti - there is... The Joker....
Why So Sneerious?
The tragedy mounts its gargoyle perch, as Gotham realizes too late that only a city overseen by a caped vigilante would be prone to inspire villains as flamboyant as its protector. For the first time on film since his appearance in graphic novels in 1940, The Joker is the heart attack Cadillac hell-on-wheels insanitarium he was always envisioned to be. And Heath Ledger - in his swansong performance before his untimely death - does not go gentle into that good night.
Was it ever imagined that someone on this earth could out-Jack Jack? And what mad fate that that one man would leave this earth after his most throat-slicing role... Heath Ledger's kamikaze performance as The Joker runs this movie on a scalpel-edge, a role so black and purple and psycho-delicious, it turns our hair green with pus. His origins are never explained, his motives are never explored -
"Some men just want to watch the world burn."
First scenes pay homage to the "Sons of The Batman," where do-gooder impostors don Batman's cowl and cape to bring vigilante justice to their corner of Gotham. After this pat action beginning, The Joker rears his painted head.
And everything gets pear-shaped.
We meet The Joker in a convoluted bank robbing scene, where double-crosses and triple-crosses against his own henchmen illustrate exactly how saw-toothed the cogs of The Joker's plans are. He plays by no rules, thriving on the chaos he creates from the tripwire of civilized society.
With his psychological profile lifted from the graphic novel BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE - "All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy" - The Joker launches a plot to undermine the underworld as well as the over world. His plots are plans within plans,
moral ambiguities piled upon moral turpitude. Playing humanity's dark side against its gray side.
Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne operates from a giant subterranean crawlspace, trying to keep Batman's name free of scandal and to simultaneously protect Gotham from The Joker's demolition smile.
In this reality-based world, vigilantes are a mixed blessing, as Harvey Dent walks a tightrope of tolerance for Batman. Meanwhile, Bruce's love interest, Rachel Dawes, is Spanking Panties with Harvey right in front of Bruce, which drives him batty.
At one point, Bruce almost gives up being Batman for the sake of Rachel's spank, because it truly looks like Harvey is making headway in cleaning up Gotham. In not being bought or negotiated with, Dent has become Gotham's "White Knight."
Then The Joker happens...
This is not a simple film by any means and the moral dilemmas each protagonist is made to face by The Joker are astoundingly well-crafted.
Dent is injured during a rescue, half his face chemically burning off, but his resulting "split-personality" as Two-Face is not the simplistic madness of Tommy Lee Jones, but the moral ambiguity of an avenger for justice who has seen both sides of the good/evil fence - and they're both the same but for *one bad day!* The Joker - in playing good against evil - unwittingly achieved a poetic symmetry in Dent.
Batman resorts to spying on Gotham's citizens via their cellphones, to pick up possible transmissions from the Joker and locate him. Lucius resents this intrusion of privacy and quits.
This is not "just" a superhero movie - oh, it's got all the action you could want - that Bat-Hummer thrashes through traffic and then births a spiffy Bat-Bike; Batman swooshes through the night and delivers chest-kicks aplenty, and a hospital goes kablooey! - but THE DARK KNIGHT questions everything ABOUT heroes, and takes itself just as seriously as The Joker doesn't.
In a sad irony, Ledger's Joker lifts another allusion from THE KILLING JOKE when he tells Batman they are "destined to be doing this forever." The Joker's fate in the movie is ambiguous, left hanging upside down from a skyscraper girder, cackling, as always, as if in on a joke that only HE gets.
As Batman burdens himself with the sins of Gotham and White Knight Dent, so that society won't crumble when their belief in heroes is shaken, Gary Oldman's words ring the messianic outro, to the question his son asks, "Why must he run?":
"...Because he's not a hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector, a dark knight."