Review: The Dark Knight

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Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gyllenhaal. Screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Rated PG-13. 152 minutes. Warner Brothers.

The deafening roar of The Dark Knight hype—fueled by Heath Ledger’s untimely death and stoked by obsessed bloggers, rabid fanboy speculation, early ticket sellouts and boffo box office forecasts—has reached a feverish pitch in the last several weeks. So when did Batman go from crime-fighting superhero to cultural touch point of such magnitude? And why?

The Dark Knight takes flight with a Tarantino-esque, Gotham bank robbery staged by make-up smeared, clownish outlaws led by the psychotic Joker (Heath Ledger), a frightening miscreant with a tortured past and desire to cause chaos. Right away, the comic-book tone we’ve come to expect from the genre is replaced with gritty, violent realism. When a film’s villain is a bedraggled psycho whose father slashed his face from ear to ear with a straight razor, you are as far from Schumacher-land as you can get.

Across the city, Batman’s (Christian Bale) influence on crime fighting has had an unfortunate counter-effect, triggering a ripple of copycats waging melee to the dismay of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and the new D.A. in town, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), a natural rival to Batman in, we discover, more ways than we imagined.

Principled Dent is determined to clean up the streets while romancing Bruce Wayne’s old fling, assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Having wrought more destruction than daring during his escapades, Batman is now considered a vigilante and little better than the organized crime boss (Eric Roberts) under scrutiny.

The Joker is an independent terrorist of sorts, positioned between law enforcement and the mob, with a simple goal—to toy with both sides, pitting them against each other and then later against their own ideologies. In the meantime, he delights in wreaking havoc, wagering a promise to reveal Batman’s true identity. In a great scene late in the film, he sets up two passenger yachts in a harbor, one carrying citizens and the other carrying convicts, both rigged to blow and each deciding the other’s fate.

Director Christopher Nolan penned the screenplay with brother Jonathan, and the result is a re-launching of the superhero franchise. Batman’s origins have always been dark, and The Dark Knight is fascinated by this duality—most notably in Wayne and Dent, who transforms into the villainous Two-Face late in the film, played to the hilt by Eckhart, who hasn’t had a role this juicy in years.

On the sidelines are two solid performances by Michael Caine as faithful manservant Alfred, and Morgan Freeman as Wayne Industries right-hand-man Lucius Fox. Both actors are excellent, taking stock-and-trade roles and informing them with depth and complexity in key scenes.

Bale, superb as the debonair playboy, throws a party for Dent before entering from a helicopter flanked by gorgeous women. He also displays great wit early on during an impromptu double date. Later, he hits notes of self-doubt with faithful Alfred, who shelters his boss from some unfortunate news in a critical display of loyalty. He advises Wayne to “know your limits,” and indeed Batman suffers injuries and scrapes. He is not indestructible, and his body knows the consequences of a bullet.

The Dark Knight’s action scenes are appropriate scaled, yet never quite thrill. An early shootout in a parking garage containing a cameo by Cillian Murphy and featuring several Batman imitators, is economical at best. Ditto a briefly exciting aerial sequence above Hong Kong. A car and semi chase through Chicago’s Lower Wacker Drive is exciting enough. And the high-tech monitoring device critical to the film’s climax makes little sense outside the gadgetry logic of the movie.

In an instantly iconic performance, Ledger—who deserved the Oscar for his elegiac, masterful turn in Brokeback Mountain—is a jumble of vocal and physical ticks, fractured neuroses, sadistic ego and twisted logic—sometimes all at once. In his most mannered performance, the late actor fires on all cylinders to create a portrait of a madman pushing the buttons of the city, with nothing to lose or gain, drunk on the pandemonium he stages.

Yet he never plays The Joker for laughs, fully aware of darkest implications of the wildcard derangement he’s channeling. During a crucial late scene set in a hospital between The Joker and disfigured Dent, the actor, disguised in a candy striper’s uniform and cherry wig, poses a warped ideology to a man who has undergone a great tragedy of both physical and moral loss.

Suitable to our times, there are no heroes in The Dark Knight, nor any clear distinctions between good and evil. Some are more so than others, but the film revels in the gray areas. Yet the film remains oddly cold, giving equal screen time to its many characters without emotionally connecting with any.

The Dark Knight, for all its massively mounted style, craftsmanship, accomplished performances and intriguing musings on crime and punishment, is a heavy affair. This is not a film about Batman, per se. Instead, it is a 132-minute crime epic like something Michael Mann might deliver, and the vigilante in the rubber suit with the cool car is just one of many players.

No doubt many will embrace this stark soberness, noting its faithfulness to the graphic novel’s spirit or hailing its grit as the true intention of creator Frank Miller. And while all of this may be correct and The Dark Knight may be a gripping enough sermon on good, evil and in between, the film doesn’t muster much old-fashioned fun amidst its respectably misanthropic milieu.

And shouldn’t it, at least a little?

Recommended.

- Lee Shoquist

lee@atnzone.com