Christian Bale stars as Batman in Warner Bros.' summer film, "The Dark Knight." (Photo credit: Warner Bros.)

‘The Dark Knight’ an imperfect summer blockbuster
By Ben Saylor
Insights
Published July 30, 2008

Life isn’t easy for a guy who puts on a giant bat suit and fights crime.

And it isn’t always easy to watch that guy put on a giant bat suit and fight crime, either. And while “The Dark Knight,” the second film in the cinematic reincarnation of the Batman franchise, certainly has its moments, it’s also a deeply flawed film.

This second installment finds Batman (Christian Bale) working with Gotham City Police Lt. Jim Gordon (the chameleonic Gary Oldman) and crusading Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, “The Black Dahlia”) to stanch the blood flow caused by the new guy in town, the Joker (Heath Ledger), a psychopath with no real interest in money or power – only in chaos.

What is immediately intriguing about “The Dark Knight” is that the Joker, along with copycat vigilantes dressing in faux bat suits, is a byproduct of Batman’s own war on crime. This theme of escalation helps give the film some substance, even if it and the film’s other ideas are delivered to the audience more times than necessary (although not nearly as much as the overrated and didactic “Batman Begins”).

Heath Ledger as the Joker in "The Dark Knight."

The trouble is, much of the rest of the film is a mess. Working with a running time of about two and a half hours, director Christopher Nolan moves his film along at breakneck speed, presumably so that the audience not only has no time to catch its breath, but also no time to question the movie’s sometimes-gaping holes in logic. It’s hard to discuss them here without giving away plot details, so I’ll leave you to figure them out for yourself.

The film’s sloppiness frequently extends to its visuals as well. While Nolan has shown some improvement over “Begins” when it comes to staging fight scenes, “The Dark Knight” indicates that he’s still got a long way to go. Nolan tends to shoot scenes from all manner of angles and cut them together haphazardly, and the result is that many of these sequences are ugly and confusing. A third act confrontation with the Joker is particularly hard to follow, and the disorienting nature of this sequence is further hampered by the introduction of a new sonar device that Batman uses to track the Joker’s whereabouts.

A lot of this won’t (and hasn’t so far) matter to people who go see the movie. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like a movie that has cost $180 million to make should have a stronger script and better action sequences.

It’s helpful, then, that the film boasts a stellar supporting turn from Ledger. His Joker is all lip-licking menace, and every time he’s on screen, the movie not only gets more interesting, but it gets significantly more disturbing. Because the Joker has no backstory (he doesn’t tell the story of how he got his facial scars the same way twice) and, seemingly no other motivation for his deeds than to cause death and destruction and turn good people against their better nature, his behavior is completely unpredictable. It’s a mesmerizing performance and a testament to Ledger’s skill that whenever he’s offscreen, the movie just isn’t as interesting.

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes in Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Dark Knight.'

With an attention-grabbing performance like Ledger’s, the rest of the cast just can’t measure up. Bale is fairly one-note as Batman’s alter ego Bruce Wayne, and as the Caped Crusader, he still uses that silly voice that sounds like Clint Eastwood possessed by the devil. He even uses that voice when he is alone with people who know his true identity. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman lend their usual solid support as Wayne’s manservant Alfred and head of Wayne Enterprises, respectively. Newcomer Maggie Gyllenhaal does her best with the role of Rachel Dawes, the woman who Dent and Wayne compete for the affections of, but the role was underwritten in the first film and is little better here. Also new to the party is Eckhart as Dent. The actor does a very good job showing Dent’s commitment to fighting crime as well as his willingness to bend the rules to do what he feels needs to be done.

In an ever-burgeoning field of comic book movies, “The Dark Knight” certainly stands tall. I just wish that it could do the same among regular movies.

On the Web:

• 'The Dark Knight' Official Warner Bros. Web site
• Movie showtimes at Westshore theaters