The Dark Mess

Rating: 1/10 (1 October 2008)

Is this what now passes for entertainment? Can this really be compared for depth and breadth with other generally highly-rated movies such as the Godfather, Casablanca or even Star Wars? Many of the IMDb top movies deal with the good old battle between good and evil and the world-weariness of the hero or anti-hero, but this film lands far short of the mark in both character and plot development, not to mention script, acting, screenplay or any of the other attributes of a movie that might be worthy of commendation.
The purity of the comic book origins of this piece are thoroughly distorted and turned into an incoherent muddle - almost any James Bond movie has a great deal more tension, humour, conviction and morality than this mess of a movie. On the other hand, if there's a serious message in The Dark Knight, I missed it, as I suspect will thousands of others. As a Batman flick, it simply doesn't deliver anything like the expectations; at yet another level as a post-9/11, human-condition, search-for-identity movie it also fails - however you want to see it, it fails on a grandiose scale.
For some of who do not live in the in the US, The Dark Knight has the potential to appear as little more than an appalling piece of hyped-up propaganda for a moribund social policy that permits and legitimises evil, mayhem and general wrongdoing and unpleasantness on a colossal scale in the pursuit of defeating the threats against society.
I've had more fun at the cinema studying the architecture.