Over-hyped, over-long, and stupid

Rating: 6/10 (3 August 2008)

The film is fun and possibly the best comic-book adaptation ever (who am I to know?), but it's still way over- hyped and about 40 minutes too long. Many things just don't work and the plot, dialog and story line are poor. For instance: the creation of Two Face is not believable, comes too late, and the events leading to his death are stupid; Batman's angst is barely expressed.
The fragmented bullet reconstruction with fingerprint is an impossibly silly stunt that's also a complete waste of time because the impossibly reconstructed fingerprint is... wait for it... USELESS! Bruce Wayne accomplishes the impossible--and for nothing! Can you say stupid writing? Movies always require suspension of belief, but when that bullet sequence was over, I felt TOTALLY BETRAYED. I wanted that time back.
Sonar in all our cell phones? yeah right. The ferry boat dilemma is not a believable dilemma, because the Joker would certainly have killed them all anyway. Maggie Gyllenhaal is sweet but unimpressive, dare I say homely? Batman can barely talk with his jaw shoved through that rigid plastic hood. Good thing he's not the star or he'd have had to endure speaking more lines and we'd have had to further endure watching his discomfort!
Ledger's acting is Oscar-nomination-worthy but not a winner). His character has simply been written too dark. In the comics, the Joker's raison d'etre was not just to cause trouble. In the comic books, a kid could rightfully imagine being the Joker. In this movie, no sane person would imagine being the Joker. That's not to say the Nolans don't have the right to be creative, but they do deviate significantly from "comicbookdom" and sanity here. Just wunnerful. Let's blow the whole world up while we're at it, because we didn't have anything to do with creating it and it's fun to watch! All the people rating this movie above 8 stars should audition for the remake of "Being There".