Mediocre car advert of a movie with plenty of bombast but no courage of its philosophical convictions

Rating: 4/10 (26 July 2008)

The Dark Knight has been grotesquely over-praised. It is a passably competent superhero movie, albeit one with few virtues and a great many flaws. It certainly is not one of the greatest films of all time - it shouldn't even be in the top fifty.
The virtues first. Heath Ledger's performance is quite good. Not brilliant - quite good. He has little to work with, but he does do his best with it. Although his Joker is more a mass of tics and mannerisms than anything deeper, they are memorable - and he brings a bit of gusto and a sense of a personality.
The other actors, all of them very good in other films, have even less to do than Heath - they work bravely to round out dull, simplistic lines and resoundingly empty characters. Nobody here, except Commissioner Gordon, has any suggestion of a home life. Nobody has any personality. These people are plot functions, pawns in moving things from A to B. Of the good guys, Maggie Gyllenhaal perhaps goes the furthest in investing her character with some spark.
The flaws? Numerous. For a start, the film shows bad editing and direction for the fight and chase sequences. Half the time, it isn't clear who is near to who or what they are in danger from. Meanwhile, the overall visual style is bland and unimaginative and suspense is generally minimal because every twist is thuddingly obvious.
The dialogue is functional but clumsy - for example, we are told twice, just in case we didn't get it, that Harvey Dent may be prepared to take on the criminals of Gotham but he feels scared at a fund-raising dinner. Nobody, in the entire movie, not once, reacts like a real human being, to anything that happens - everything is stagey, simplistic, artificial.
And the philosophy? The depth that is supposed to make this "more than a comic book movie"? Not there. For a start, it is impossible to take seriously pronouncements on the human condition from a movie whose view of crime is that criminals are all either members of a Dick Tracy style mob underworld who sit around in suits, embodying racial and cultural stereotypes and talking about how the Batman is cutting in on their action, on the one hand, or pure, unexplainable EEEEEVIL freaks on the other. As a representation of evil, sin, temptation, crime or madness, this is so pathetically empty and stupid and clichéd it would be unimpressive in a children's cartoon. To anyone who has seen The Wire, read the news or even just been outside and talked to actual adults, it seems laughable. It's hard to take a movie seriously at all when its sense of crime comes down to something so callow and so naive.
But apart from that, the movie does not seem to have the courage of its convictions. It flirts with an authoritarian message about needing a superman to protect us from chaos, someone who has to be empowered with the right to pry into our privacy and lie to us - a daddy who always knows best. And it toys with the idea that humans are fundamentally bad - but then decides that, no, people aren't after all (when neither group on the ships chooses to blow the other up). Except when they are (as Harvey Dent turns to the dark side). This is not searing complexity. This is trying not to offend anyone whilst flirting with relevance to contemporary political debates. This is saying nothing, very loudly and a bit pompously.