Didn't live up to the hype for me

Rating: 5/10 (27 July 2008)

Well, i'm fighting a gushing torrent of positive opinion here, but i think this film is in no way anywhere near a masterpiece of cinema, the main reasons being that the plot is poor, the film is far too long and that it is also balanced far too far in favour of the villains.
The movie started brilliantly with an excellent bank robbery scene, and continued with aplomb until about halfway through, when the flow of the film just stalled. The plot just stopped making sense with the joker seemingly sauntering around Gotham with face paint on and obvious facial scars doing exactly what he wanted and nobody even noticing this strange man. He would stick out like a sore thumb wouldn't he? why did batman have so much trouble finding him? At about this time in the movie i really started losing interested due to the many plot flaws and inconsistencies on top of the fact that we were about 1hr 30 minutes through the film with no ending in site.
And, yes, the film is too long, and thats because the plot is too convoluted. And you couldn't cut anything out because the film would suffer even more from it. I would even imagine a lot was cut out anyway, particularly from the latter half of the film.
The joker dominates the film from start to end and you would think this is a good thing because heath ledger does a great job portraying him. But its too much of a good thing - it just unbalances the film - it makes it too dark, too downbeat. I was expecting batman to come into his own in the later half of the film to balance the darkness of the first half, but he doesn't - another villain joins instead! I just think this film is vastly overrated and nowhere near as good as the original. Batman Begins was more consistent in its portrayal of the batman universe - the current batman franchise is based on a brutal realism but Dark Knight had too many flaws that undermined this, from the unrealistic plot elements to Harvey Two-Face's ridiculously over-the-top and unbelievable cgi facial damage.
Lastly, the film has compromised itself by trying to pander to general cinema audiences. In the UK the film was given a 12a rating which means practically anyone can see it. So the blood and violence has been reduced. But the nasty tone of the film remains with many scenes of implied violence that are probably worse than actually seeing it. It is in fact a very violent film with many sadistic torture scenes that are in no way suitable for people under 15.
Having written all this, i still thought the film was OK but in no way the masterpiece everyone thinks it is. I was expecting much more and it didn't live up to the hype for me. But once everyone calms down a bit and looks at the film again in the cold light of day, i think time will judge this as an above average action movie with a good turn from the joker that really does go on a bit too long.