Overall Rating
  Awesome: 68.49%
Worth A Look: 18.49%
Average: 5.88%
Pretty Bad: 2.1%
Total Crap: 5.04%
10 reviews, 178 user ratings
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| Dark Knight, The |
by W. Scott Gordon
"More than an Ordinary Comic-book Movie, Less than a Masterpiece"
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Top-rate production values, a stellar cast, and a serious message about the chaos of our modern times are slightly weighed down by bloated plotting and exhausting pacing. Bale is again solid as Batman, and the late Heath Ledger gives a great penultimate star-turn as The Joker, whose rootless characterization fascinates but doesn’t quite warrant an Oscar. Aaron Eckhart carries the day as Harvey Dent/Two-Face in a pathos-filled performance.Contrary to its title (referring to the central character’s hero-as-vigilante status), the latest incarnation of the Batman franchise isn’t really about Batman. It is, rather, a commentary on the consequences of having such a person around—would crime stop completely? Would people unabashedly embrace the bat, or would he be seen by many as just another kind of menace?
In Nolan’s anarchic vision, Batman’s presence certainly inspires its share of admirers, mostly copycats whose dubious tactics get them killed or badly maimed because, as Batman himself points out, he’s wearing more than shoulder-pads to soften the blow. It also gives Gotham’s criminal elements, who have been “backed against the wall,” the impetus to dig further down into the inky well of evil than ever before, giving rise to The Joker (played with grim relish by the late, often great Heath Ledger). These gangsters are not particularly hard nuts to crack; their goals are money and power. When The Joker bursts upon the scene with a singular purpose—the spread of chaos, money and power be damned—the souls of Batman and Gotham’s citizenry are put to the test.
During a key monologue, the Joker explains the horrifying reality of what he represents. Planned acts of violence, including but not limited to war, are indeed terrifying; in the end, however, they fail to make much of an impression because they can be anticipated. But as he destroys city streets, buildings and lives, mostly through random explosions that echo real-life terrorist acts in our post-9/11 world, The Joker keeps everyone on a extremely tight leash that may be choked up, brutally, at any given moment. The Dark Knight is the story of what Batman and those around him will sacrifice in the quest to restore order.
Knight’s relentless adherence to the sense of chaos of our times represents both its strongest and weakest point. The Joker says that the beauty of terrorism lies in peoples’ inability to anticipate it, yet every frame drips with the chilling knowledge that he shall return to wreak havoc. Gotham (and by extension, the movie audience) is never safe. But I think that terrorism and other acts of violence are terrifying not only because of their seemingly random nature, but because they happen during otherwise quiet moments in the course of normal lives tragically interrupted. Unfortunately, Nolan never slows down enough to show us ordinary Gothamites feeling truly out of danger, therefore selling his message short.
Pacing and plotting are also chaotic. The elegant Batman Begins can be divided into two distinct halves (I’ve always preferred the first, the point leading up to Bruce Wayne’s donning of the famous cowl). Knight, in contrast, gives us one coherent arc amid a sometimes literal minefield of threads, the most needless of which involves some sort of money-laundering scheme by a corporation in Hong Kong. While the skyscraper sequences are breathtaking, and it’s nice to see the bat flying outside of his cage every once in awhile, it’s difficult to care about what’s happening. In its raw realism, unmarred by pretentious CGI, Chicago-as-Gotham is a more than adequate representation of our hopes and fears without a forced nod to The Rise of China.
As a rule, plot and location should be kept simple in these kinds of movies. Especially when the central message is conveyed so well by an intelligent script, brought to life by a cast of wonderful actors who, each in his or her own way, breathe life into “the darkness before the dawn.” As mentioned, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne/Batman is not the central character here, and (to his enormous credit) never tries to be. A year after first becoming the Caped Crusader, Bats here grapples with the both the literal and symbolic meaning of his existence as an admittedly crazy force of order on one side, in contrast to The Joker’s insane chaotic bent on the other. Standing between them is Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent, Gotham’s new District Attorney, who will become a perfectly-cleaved representation of good and evil, the Janus-faced tendencies that reside deep inside all of us. Christian Bale does his intense best as one point of this triangle, but he’s overshadowed by two virtuoso performances.
And the throaty-voicebox has got to go. Realism is admirable, but when your source is a comic-book, you can take some liberties to ease the cheese. Inside a genre where a towering Christopher Reeve concealed his identity just by wearing glasses, and a short, balding Michael Keaton known better for Beetleguice conveyed his menace via one gruff glance from behind the Bat-mask, Christian Bale can afford to speak in his normal (albeit American-accented) voice as Batman. If nobody can see that the Bill Gates of Gotham is the only one who can possibly have such wonderful toys, then the secret is safe! Bale has a bit more fun as Wayne, but not enough; he smiles exactly two times in the film, not a great track-record for a multi-billionaire with a boatload of swimsuit models at his beck-and-call.
As Batman’s arch-nemesis, Heath Ledger makes an intriguing star-turn that, tragically, represents his penultimate performance. Critics who panned Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the Joker in 1989’s Batman criticized it because it had too much Nicholson in it, that it was essentially The Shining in clown makeup. I personally found it to be brilliant, perfect in the context of Burton’s gothic but cheeky vision. Beware of baseless comparisons between these films and performances! That said, if Nicholson’s performance was indeed too Nicholsonesque, Heath Ledger’s take shows a haunting absence of anything linking the character to the actor himself. I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain yet, and I missed 10 Things I Hate About You because I’m not a tween-aged girl. But the affecting young police officer who conveyed so much pathos in Monster’s Ball, the naively robust son of Mel Gibson in The Patriot, and the square-jawed hero in The Brothers Grimm, while all very different, still came across as the recognizably talented Heath Ledger doing good work.
Ledger’s Joker is nothing short of a jack-o-lantern which, having been completely carved up and de-seeded of all humanity, now sits rotting on a stoop, an eerie candle-flicker barely discernable behind the black pools of its hollowed-out eyes. He is at once creepy, terrifying, and pathetic. He is also, truth be told, disturbingly funny. One scene, where he has not yet blown up a particular building to his satisfaction, is simply a gem. He presses the detonator again and again in childish frustration--as the charge finally works and we are witness to a final, devastating KA-BOOM, The Joker lopes out of the frame as giddy as a schoolboy. We don’t want to laugh with him, but we can’t help it. Whether The Joker is in manic motion on the streets or deadly still in a jail cell, all eyes are on him no matter the scene. Lack of a reliable back-story and discernable motivation fits the character, but it’s impossible to care about him. I usually associate the phrase, “Oscar-winner” with actors whose characters, no matter how thick their physical or mental masks, convey something from behind them. I am both dazzled and horrified by Heath Ledger’s madman, yet there may not be enough meat to the character to warrant an Oscar. Let the onslaught of flying tomatoes begin.
As a vehicle of pure anarchy, The Joker crashes straight through D.A. Harvey Dent’s plans to clean up the city and, in an ironic twist, puts him on the road to the dark side. It is through Dent that we finally understand Nolan’s moral crux: In uncertain times, even the best of us have the capacity to turn to evil. As Harvey Dent, Eckhart’s complex mix of charm and smarm works beautifully; as the coin-flipping Two-Face, whose face and heart have been scarred forever, Eckhart portrays a man exactly half-unhinged. He knows the price of doing evil, but can’t always afford to do good.
Because his role called for restraint over flamboyance, inner conflict over crazed villainy, Eckhart stands at the top of the Batman-Harvey-Joker triangle. I only wish that some of the more extraneous plot elements could have been shelved in favor of fleshing out Harvey’s duality in a convincing fashion. His transformation is handled somewhat hastily in the last act, perhaps leaving some to wonder whether the character-arc was truly earned. Aaron Eckhart certainly gave a far better performance than Hayden Christensen did with a similar character study in Revenge of the Sith. The supporting players (Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman) comport themselves very well, although Maggie Gyllenhaal as underwritten love interest Rachel Dawes merely drives the plot toward its ambiguous climax.In the end, it is not that the forces of evil have been vanquished so much as the playing field has been redrawn yet again. Batman proves his mettle, but he is not a hero in the eyes of those he seeks to protect. Can he be redeemed? Wait for the sequel.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=17085&reviewer=406
originally posted: 08/21/08 22:27:08
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USA
18-Jul-2008 (PG-13)
UK
N/A
Australia
18-Jul-2008
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