Not really sure what to call it, but it's no masterpiece

Rating: 7/10 (21 July 2008)

I went into The Dark Knight with great anticipation. Of all the superheroes, I love the character Batman (at least the one in the comics and the more famous cartoon series, even Batman Beyond). This movie starts very slow, so I waited and waited and waited for this great, awesome masterpiece...but it never came.
The reason Batman is such a great character is that he like Two face has two sides. In this movie we never see them. He one sided, one dimensional overshadowed by every other character in the movie, especially Heath Ledger's joker and Gary Oldman's Jim Gordon. We see real emotion in these characters, we even see emotion in Micheal Caine and Morgan Freeman's characters but no emotion from our hero/antihero Batman. All we get is a long convoluted story to catch a madman and a horribly, over the top raspy voiced super human, thug. The writers don't ever take the time to dwell into the psychology of this man who night after night goes out to fight crime. Even when he confronted with copycats we see little emotion from Bruce Wayne, just dumb dialog.
Now I thought Katie Holmes was bad in the Batman Begins but Ms. Gyllenhaal is worse and sorry to say this but I was glad when they killed her. She was pitiful looking and annoying. Aaron Eckhart is okay as Harvey Dent but I wish they had the guts to use a Black man like the original Dent.
Lastly I want to say a few things about the so called message. Good writers can make a point without smashing you in the face with it. Obviously these weren't good writers. The film reverts to suspenseful music in the place of real suspense and give us two boats filled with plastic characters, when they should have spent that time not showing us what they were doing but what Bruce Wayne/Batman was thinking and feeling. But instead we got long-winded preachy speeches and an obviously wounded hero running off like nothing was hurt. By the look on most of the patrons faces in my theater, they were disappointed too. Too bad, Ledger's Joker steals the show and Batman is buried by him.