Mediocre

Rating: 5/10 (29 July 2009)

Yawn.
A few years ago, despite repeated critical praise and entreaties from friends and colleagues, I gave up on ever wasting my precious time on earth watching another Steven Spielberg film. Time and again I was told, by others, 'No, this time I really mean it, it's a GREAT film,' and time and again I would leave the theater angry or nauseous. But, now I am at the point where I feel the same way about ALL Hollywood tripe. As with the Spielberg crapfests, I was told how wonderful excrement like Brokeback Mountain and Crash were. They weren't. Similarly, almost all the reviews of The Dark Knight were glowing; especially praising the performance of Heath Ledger (the cock-mumbling hero of Brokeback Mountain) as the Joker. And with his demise shortly before last year's premiere of the film, the inevitable chorus of Oscar buzz for his performance rose, with him, indeed, snagging a posthumous Best Supporting Actor nomination and win (ala James Dean). So, was this the greatest film of all time? Was Ledger's performance one for the ages?
No.
In fact, not even close. And, as badly hyped as the Spielberg stool has been, and as nauseating as the PC films named above were, The Dark Knight, and Ledger's performance, have to be the two most over the top unbelievably hyper-hyped things Hollywood has ever unfurled. Why? Simple. The picture barely rises above mediocre, and Ledger is nowhere near as good a Joker as Jack Nicholson was, twenty years ago, in Tim Burton's Batman.
The Dark Knight simply goes on for far too long- 153 minutes- and gets worse with each passing minute. It goes from a possibly good film, in its first hour, to a barely passable one in the span of the last hour or so. A good 45 minutes could have been lopped off with no discernible detraction from the film. In ten years, few people will care about this film, and Ledger's Oscar win will go down as one of those great WTF? questions wiser generations will chuckle over. The Dark Knight is not good comic book stuff, it's not good sci fi, it's not a good action film. It's just hype.
Yawn. (the sequel)