DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan
CAST:
Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Eric Roberts, Anthony Michael Hall, Michael Jai White, Monique Curnen, Ron Dean, Nestor Carbonell, Cillian Murphy, William Fichtner
REVIEW:
With Batman Begins, his 2005 reboot of the Batman film franchise, hailed as bringing the Caped Crusader back to the screen better than ever, Christopher Nolan had the green light to proceed with the highly-anticipated sequel that came to be called The Dark Knight. For most fans, Nolan's return to Gotham City was worth the three year wait. Batman Begins returned Batman to respectability; The Dark Knight takes this capital and runs with it, crafting what is easily the most ambitious and adult-oriented comic book superhero movie ever made. As entertaining as the likes of X-Men and Spider-Man might be, The Dark Knight is on a whole other level. The Dark Knight comes close to being a perfect Batman movie.
Since defeating Ra's Al Ghul at the climax of Batman Begins, Batman (Christian Bale) is now an established figure in Gotham City. Criminals run and hide at the sight of the Batsignal, and once all-powerful mobsters are afraid to show their faces at night. Officially, he is still considered an outlaw by the Gotham authorities, but Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) is working more and more closely with him, and the other cops largely turn a blind eye to his association with Batman. Gordon introduces Batman to a new ally, crusading new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who, aided and abetted by Batman and Gordon, launches a campaign to clean up Gotham, publicly going after the mob's money laundering operations, privately relying on Batman to bring in the "untouchable" criminals. Dent starts to make headway, so much so in fact that Bruce sees an opportunity emerging on the horizon to hang up the Batsuit, hand over the reins to someone who can achieve the same ends as himself without having to operate outside of the law or hide his face, and maybe still have a chance for a normal life with Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), although she is now involved with Dent. But while Batman's presence has struck fear into the criminal underworld, he has also had effects he hadn't anticipated, not all of them positive. There are copycats who go out in makeshift Batsuits and try to take down criminals themselves, but without his skill or restraint. And as their hold over Gotham threatens to slip away, the mobs of Gotham, led by Sal Maroni (Eric Roberts), who has replaced Carmine Falcone (played by Tom Wilkinson in Begins) turn to a man who presents himself as their savior- a bizarre, twisted criminal mastermind with a slashed smile and clownish facepaint known only as The Joker (Heath Ledger). The Joker offers to eliminate Batman- for a price- but soon proves to have an agenda all his own. He's not really interested in helping the mob, or in their money, he is a self-described "agent of chaos" bent on "upsetting the established order", which puts him inexorably on a collision course with Batman and those close to him.
The most key thing that The Dark Knight does right- which was also the biggest reason for the success of Batman Begins- is that Nolan and his cast and crew treat the material completely seriously, without a whiff of camp or condescension. Nolan has mentioned not only the obvious sources of the Batman comics, but crime epics like Heat as influences. While Batman Begins revolved around Bruce Wayne, The Dark Knight is working on a broader scope, including enough supporting characters and subplots to rival a Batman graphic novel. The movie includes any number of nods to various Batman comics, such as a rooftop meeting between Batman, Dent, and Gordon inspired by and even using one line of dialogue from The Long Halloween, and The Joker making television broadcasts announcing his upcoming crimes as in The Man Who Laughs. Unlike many of Nolan's films, which have reputations for toying with chronology (possibly his best-known film, Memento, goes backwards from the end to the beginning, and The Prestige
and even Batman Begins feature numerous episodic flasbacks and jumps backward and forwards in time), The Dark Knight is straightforward and linear, but that doesn't mean Nolan has abandoned his fondness for complex plotlines. Unsurprisingly, considering his brother and The Prestige screenwriter Jonathan Nolan co-wrote the script with him, The Dark Knight's plot takes a relentlessly twisty-turny path that heads in unpredictable directions. It's not labyrinthine on The Prestige's level, but it's not a movie where a trip to the restroom is advisable. And what might be more impressive than how completely and utterly straight Nolan play the material might be how far he is prepared to go to defy superhero movie expectations. In everything from Superman to all three Spider-Mans to even Batman Begins, we're used to seeing damsels in distress flung from high places and snatched from certain doom at the last minute, the villain hatching some climactic evil scheme but the innocents being rescued, good cleanly triumphing over evil, and all being well. That doesn't always happen here, and the fact that audience members assured that certain characters are safe might be in for a surprise gives the movie an uneasy, unpredictable feel where it seems almost anything might happen. At the time, much was made of Batman Begins taking Batman back to its darker, more serious roots, but the aptly-named The Dark Knight goes beyond anything in Begins. Batman Begins had few "silly" moments, almost all located in its third act, which nearly goes off the rails with a silly climactic master plan to drive Gotham insane and Gordon reduced too much to bumbling sidekick material. The Dark Knight has virtually no silliness, and warrants its PG-13 rating, maintaining its air of grim menace all the way to the fadeout, with a resolution (of sorts) that may be the most downbeat and ambiguous conclusion to a superhero movie since Jean Grey sacrificed herself at the end of X-Men 2, and maybe even then. There's a climactic villainous master plan of sorts, but the movie continues after its undoing, and the true climax is all about Batman, Dent, and Gordon. Parents considering taking small children to see Knight should do so with the knowledge that a major character suffers the inevitable fate of having one side of his face burned off, and that the movie only maintains its PG-13 rating by employing the time-honored "camera cut away a split second before most gruesome moment" trick; even so, the implication of what happens when The Joker sticks his knife in a victim's mouth and snarls "let's put a smile on that face" is plenty clear enough.
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Of course, the biggest draw is The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger, whose accidental death of a prescription drug overdose dominated talk of the movie leading up to its release along with sky-high hype and talk of a posthumous Oscar nomination. The Joker is probably the best-known comic book villain ever created, and no fictional hero and villain are as inextricably linked as Batman and The Joker. They are flip sides of the coin, order vs. chaos, and fortunately the boundless praise heaped on Ledger's performance is not merely out of sympathy for his untimely death. Ledger is terrific, not only doing justice to the character from the comics, but providing one of the most memorable and endlessly watchable movie villains since Anthony Hopkins' indelible Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Ledger is occasionally morbidly humorous (and has at least two laugh-out-loud moments, one with a one-liner, the other a visual gag), but he's no goofy caricature. He's flippant and sardonic, but where Ledger succeeds where in my opinion Jack Nicholson's overrated version failed is that he also makes The Joker genuinely frightening. Nicholson's Joker overdid the former at the expense of the latter, inviting us to laugh along with and to some extent almost root for him. Ledger has moments where he makes us laugh, but his Joker is a vile, sadistic creature who acts without any clear reason and is utterly devoid of compunction, with a genuine devious, manipulative malevolence laying behind his nutball exterior. 
Ledger might be the show-stealer, but he's not the only member of the cast to do a credible job. Most of the cast and crew from Batman Begins returns here (the most prominent exception being Katie Holmes, who is replaced by Maggie Gyllenhaal). Christian Bale continues to be nearly the ideal Bruce Wayne/Batman, with a steely-eyed stoicism that lends him an imposing presence none of his predecessors in the role was able to match. About the only complaint is that Bale's Batman voice, which didn't bother me in Begins despite being a source of criticism at the time, seems more exaggerated here, occasionally to an unintentionally cringe-worthy extent. Michael Caine has slightly less to do this time, while Morgan Freeman has slightly more, but both veteran thespians are welcome in any capacity, and provide their effortless humor and dignity. Alfred again serves as Bruce's conscience, while Fox again hooks him up with some nifty gadgets; if Bale was playing 007, Freeman would be Q. Gary Oldman has a significantly expanded role, and no silliness about driving the Tumbler. This isn't one of Oldman's showiest performances- in fact, he is exceptionally subdued- but he invests Gordon with a simple, dutiful integrity and makes him more of a counterpart for Batman instead of the vaguely bumbling sidekick Begins had him as. Aside from The Joker, the other main new character is Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent, a crusading idealistic politician of good intentions who any Batfan can tell you is fated to become the villainous, disfigured Two-Face. There's always something a little too slick and cocky about Eckhart (unsurprisingly, he seems most at home playing lawyers), and Harvey initially seems a little superficial, but as the movie goes on Eckhart brings across that trying to clean up Gotham means more to him than just lip service and popularity points, as well as the chinks in his armor. Eckhart plays Dent with growing intensity as he reaches his inevitable downward spiral, but since he's still playing, at least for the majority of the movie, a relatively normal, restrained individual, his performance exists unavoidably in the shadow of Ledger's, although ultimately it's his character arc that provides the closest thing the movie has to a true overriding plot strand. Maggie Gyllenhaal replaces Katie Holmes, who declined to return, in the role of Rachel Dawes, but while Gyllenhaal is generally a better-regarded actress than Holmes, she's unable to make anything substantial out of Rachel, who never escapes feeling like a superfluous character who doesn't give anyone who plays her much to grab onto. In relatively small roles, we have Eric Roberts doing his smug gangster bit as Maroni, Anthony Michael Hall popping up periodically as a reporter out for Batman scoops, Michael Jai White as another of Gotham's gang lords, Monique Curnen as a subordinate of Gordon's, and in a bit of ironic casting, Nestor Carbonell, who played Batman parody Batmanuel on the action sitcom The Tick, as Gotham's Mayor. Cillian Murphy has a fleeting cameo almost at the beginning of the movie; Murphy and/or Scarecrow fans who hoped he'd have something substantial to do in the second installment will be disappointed.
Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, despite being done by the crew, director, and much of the same cast, are markedly different. Begins was an origin story that devoted much of its time to developing the character of Bruce Wayne and detailing the creation of his Batman persona. Here, Batman is an established character, and the filmmakers were free to launch headfirst into the story. It opens with a bang- literally- in a fast-paced bank heist staged by The Joker that might remind some viewers of Heat (Heat cast member William Fichtner has a cameo as a belligerent bank manager in a probably deliberate nod), and rarely pauses for breath from then on. Scenes go by at a rapid-fire clip. The storyline, which juggles all kinds of subplots and side characters, is complex and ambitious. Some of it- including the imposter Batmen, a Wayne Enterprises accountant (Joshua Harto) who asks too many questions, and a tangent in Hong Kong- is a little extraneous, but it's a testament to the Nolans' deftness as both writers and filmmakers that nothing stands out as glaringly superfluous, and the two most important plotlines- Batman vs. The Joker, and Harvey Dent's downfall- are given their due(The Dark Knight could give Spider-Man 3 a few lessons, both about what "dark" really means, and about juggling various plot strands without everything coming out feeling half-baked). Part of the problem with Tim Burton's 1989 Batman is how Nicholson's mugging was allowed to overwhelm everything (he was even first-billed over Michael Keaton in the credits). Here, partly because Heath Ledger maintains a modicum of restraint, partly because he's not given enough screentime to take over the entire movie, The Joker is the catalyst for the plot but not the only important part of it. In fact, the real central plot strand belongs to Harvey Dent. While we know Dent is doomed to become Two-Face, the Nolans put their own spin on the particulars, and we're not certain how everything is going to wrap up. The Dark Knight is very much to Nolan's Batman series as The Empire Strikes Back was to Star Wars, a sequel that is far more layered and ambitious than its predecessor and injects more darkness into the mix. In Batman Begins and A New Hope, the fight was not over, but good had clearly come out on top. Here, it's not that simple. The Joker rampages through Gotham like a force of destruction, seemingly desiring nothing more than to spread chaos and mayhem for his own murky motives. Money holds no meaning for him except as a means to an end, and he's not intimidated by a sound Batman thrashing. He doesn't have any master plan as such, just a relentless series of devious plots aimed at "upsetting the established order". But while The Joker doesn't have any grand overall scheme like Ra's Al Ghul, there is method to his madness, rooted in an uncompromisingly cynical and negative view of humanity. "When the chips are down, these civilized people will eat each other", he tells Batman, and to prove his point, he stages scenarios he calls "social experiments" aimed at forcing Gothamites, individually, in pairs, or in bunches into impossible moral dilemmas. By his very nature, The Joker is not the most three-dimensional of characters, but here, as in his best portrayals in the comics, he is a walking representation of a larger theme, a fiendish trickster-god of chaos and anarchy aimed at testing humanity's true nature when pushed to the brink. The Nolans obviously intended to make their story topical- The Joker is twice explicitly referred to as a "terrorist"- but just when it seems things can't spin any more out of control, they show a glimmer of faith in humanity. Law and order prevails, at least to a point, but the good guys pay terrible prices for their victories.
All this darkness and complexity doesn't mean The Dark Knight skimps on one basic ingredient for any summer blockbuster comic book superhero movie- action. The most ambitious and extended action sequence in the film is a car chase between a SWAT van, a semi hijacked by The Joker, and the Tumbler, and there are a number of sure-fire crowd-pleasing moments, including the debut of the Batpod, a suped-up motorcycle sporting cannons and monster tires. When it comes to the hand-to-hand fight scenes, Nolan shows improvement from Batman Begins, allowing us to actually see the fighting, although a darkly-lit and somewhat disorganized climactic fight through multiple levels of a building gets a little confusing. There are three sequences, one as the police scramble to protect three officials simultaneously targeted by The Joker, another as Bruce races to find The Joker before he can assassinate the Mayor, and a third, as Batman faces a race against time in which the outcome is almost as terrible if he loses as if he wins, that generate pulse-pounding suspense. But the standout sequence of the movie isn't any of the action bits, it's Batman and The Joker facing each other across a table. Ledger gets a lot more to say than just cliched comic baddie one-liners, and we come to understand a measure of what makes him tick . In fact, there are shades in this scene of the encounters between Hannibal and Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs (which almost anyone will agree are the parts everyone remembers).
I might have awarded The Dark Knight four stars, but one nitpick irked me enough to dock half a star. I would have preferred Two-Face, one of the most complex Batman villains and one of his more prominent adversaries after The Joker, to be created in one movie and been a full-fledged villain in another, or at least had his fate left with more ambiguity than the seeming finality with which the Nolans end things. Nolan has said repeatedly that he concentrates only on making the best movie possible while making it, without thought of sequels or follow-ups, and the way he handles Two-Face bears this out. However, it's worth noting that half an hour of Two-Face in Nolan's hands is better and vastly more faithful and respectful to the character than a full movie's worth of the Joel Schumacher-Tommy Lee Jones bastardization in Batman Forever. In fact, as with Batman and The Joker, Two-Face is nailed so well that we wish we could have more of him.
Will Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale return for a third visit to Gotham City? Despite its apparent wrap up of Two-Face, The Dark Knight is open-ended enough to warrant a follow-up, but it's up in the air at this point. At this point, whether this cast and crew ever gives us another Batman film, Batfans owe them, and Christopher Nolan above all, a debt of gratitude for giving us two Batman films that have a right to be called by that name, and in The Dark Knight, one of the most ambitious and mature "comic book movies" ever made.
***1/2
the video version of this review
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