movie film review | chris tookey
 
     
     
 

Dark Knight

 (12A)
© Warner Brothers - all rights reserved
     
  Dark Knight Review
Tookey's Rating
5 /10
 
Average Rating
7.74 /10
 
Starring
Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger
Full Cast >
 

Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Written by: Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan

 
Tookey's Review
Pro Reviews
Mixed Reviews
Anti Reviews
Cast
 
 
Released: 2008
   
Genre: SERIES
SEQUEL
ACTION
COMIC STRIP
   
Origin: US
   
Colour: C
   
Length: 152
 
 


 
Overlong and pretentious – but a hit.
Reviewed by Chris Tookey



The Dark Knight deserves part of its hype. Heath Ledger (pictured) makes the Joker a memorably creepy, deranged villain. It’s the kind of showy, if insubstantial, role that attracts an Oscar.

Most of the stunts are spectacular, the new batbike looks cool, and Batman does a neat trick of lassoing a truck so that it does a back flip. Jails and hospitals blow up, on an impressive if preposterous scale. Batman even carries out a daring kidnap in Hong Kong.

And some of the best scenes in British director Christopher Nolan’s film are the small, still ones, such as when one of Bruce Wayne’s accountants threatens to expose his identity as Batman unless he is paid 10 million dollars a year for life, and Wayne’s tame scientist (Morgan Freeman) suavely suggests he may be unwise to blackmail a zillionaire who’s ruthlessly ultra-violent.

There’s more than enough entertainment and eye candy to make this a hit.

So why don’t I rate it more highly? My most heartfelt complaint would be about the noise. The film has the worst sound balance I have ever heard. Poor diction, a bombastic score (even when nothing exciting is happening) and over-enthusiastic effects made much of the dialogue inaudible in the print that was shown to me.

The plot is often impossible to follow. And the movie, though dark, isn’t as deep as some have claimed. It’s pretentious and overblown, and its unwarranted length of over two and a half hours left me more fidgety than exhilarated.

At the start of The Dark Knight, Batman (Christian Bale) is in trouble. Copycat vigilantes with guns are ruining his reputation. He muses that the time may have come for him to hang up his cape, so that the girl of his dreams (Maggie Gyllenhaal, a distinct improvement on Katie Holmes but still saddled with a poorly written role) will marry him. “Gotham needs a hero with a face,” Batman announces.

The replacement hero he chooses is clean-cut District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and they set out to destroy organised crime in Gotham, with the help of honest police lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman, seriously under-energised).

But they are reckoning without The Joker (Heath Ledger), a maniacal arch-criminal whose motivation is not so much greed as anarchy. As Batman’s faithful butler (Michael Caine) puts it, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Ledger plays the Joker as a terrorist with no redeeming features, who gets a sexual thrill from threatening people with his knife and savouring their fear - an all too topical quirk. He’s as implacable as Javier Bardem’s killer in No Country for Old Men, but with smudged clown make-up, a flickering, reptilian tongue and the same macabre malevolence that Malcolm McDowell brought to A Clockwork Orange.

Ledger is subtler and scarier than Jack Nicholson was in Tim Burton’s first Batman movie; but his character has nowhere to go except madder and madder. And his success makes little sense. When a villain kills his own associates as readily as this one murders the forces of law and order, it’s difficult to see how he ever attracts the multitude of helpers he would need. Also, for an anarchist, he’s ridiculously well organised.

So, although the Joker is an arresting screen presence, you don’t believe in him for an instant.

Some of the plot twists, too, left me unconvinced – especially the transformation of Harvey Dent, which seems too sudden and melodramatic.

One reason Batman Begins impressed was that you could follow the logic of the characters’ actions and enjoy the explanation of how and why a damaged, parentless child came to be a superhero. In The Dark Knight, Batman has become a bore. Christian Bale is handsome and can be a fine actor, but here he’s monotonous, dull and lugubrious. When the Joker tells him “I won’t kill you because you’re just too much fun!” it’s impossible to see what he is on about.

Christopher Nolan and his co-writer brother Jonathan evidently think Batman is a figure whose tragic qualities have Shakespearian depth. He isn’t – mainly because his problems aren’t universal enough. How many of us face the problem of having a split personality, or unlimited wealth, or the responsibility of being solely able to fight the worst kinds of crime?

You can take a character out of a comic strip, but you can’t take the comic-strip out of the character. Batman is not a tragic hero at all, but an adolescent action-figure with the kind of problems most of us can only dream of having. This may make him good box-office, especially among males who feel ineffectual, impoverished and lacking in even one personality; but it doesn’t give him the depth of Hamlet.

Their summer blockbuster explores grand themes: whether it can be right to use torture on terrorists, the conflict between public and private morality, whether the public prefers to be told lies rather than deal with the truth. The Nolan brothers are clearly determined not to be confused with the Nolan sisters.

I appreciate their ambition; but they’ve overreached – and lost their sense of humour. Their movie is compromised by the perceived demands of its audience. It’s grimly sadistic. It doesn’t fight terror. It embraces it.

Ledger becomes, in a curiously twisted way, the moral centre of the movie, and this makes The Dark Knight an unintentionally sick spectacle, pretending to justify law and justice but in reality celebrating violence and chaos.

There’s plenty in this blockbuster to admire, but I can’t honestly say that I enjoyed it.

Incidentally, although it’s been allocated a 12A certificate, it’s completely unsuitable for children, who will find it much too murky, incomprehensible and frightening. In a sane universe where movie industry-financed Jokers weren’t running, and ruining, film classification, this would be a 15.


Key to Symbols