Movie Review: The Dark Knight Friday, Jul 18 2008
General 11:11 pm
Despite loosely masquerading as a Batman film, The Dark Night is feverishly estranged from any comic book roots. The genre itself presupposes a certain modicum of both humor and literacy, neither of which garners more than the briefest of cameos in this generally disappointing endeavor. While Heath Ledger’s chilling turn as the Joker is sure to rightfully garner postmortem praise, cinematic psychosis is not alone enough to save a gratuitously blood-spattering thriller that runs one act too long.
Gotham’s latest caper fable attempts to reveal the plethoric spectrum between good and evil, yet ultimately fails to produce a single character defined by such grayscale. The juxtaposition of a needlessly-complex plot against painfully simplistic figures is troublesome, as the once-eponymous hero battles an organized crime syndicate with multinational ties while, simultaneously, attempting to undermine a cake-faced Joker. That the painted villain, a near co-protagonist in this rendition, is also occasionally at odds with the usual lineup of Sicilian suspects creates a tremendous amount of worthless tension.
The notion of fugitive-on-fugitive crime would potentially prove a meritorious dramatic exploration if the lawless figures bore sufficient depth so as to allow genuine emotional conflict. Yet in a film where the only remotely conflicted villain fails to arrive on the scene until roughly the time when credits should be rolling, it is difficult to absorb the interplay between bad and worse with more than a polite yawn and check of the wristwatch.
Mr. Ledger does steal the screen in the same deft way his character loots a bank, though Christian Bale’s rendition of Bruce Wayne is patently flat, while Maggie Gyllenhaal’s undertaking of shared love interest Rachel Dawes is too similar to Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson to demand much in the way of acclaim. Unfortunately the damsel in distress is not the only déjà vu-rich effort; while Mr. Ledger may prove successful in his final film, it does occasionally seem he is perhaps less intent on playing the Joker than on playing Jack Nicholson playing the Joker. Imitation, no matter how convincing, remains less a form of creativity than flattery. Yet for a film badly estranged from its once-cute comic book roots, such reminders of prior renditions are unwelcome fodder for comparison.
The notion of a dark Batman tale is not new – this entourage of Gotham stand-outs long ago departed the realm of Adam West’s chosen methodology of humor through hyperbole. Yet The Dark Knight amasses an astounding body count, displaying the variety of cinematic indifference to the lives of named characters normally reserved for less fantastical stories of war. Such would perhaps be excusable if the traditional action paradigm of comedic relief was heeded even in the slightest. Instead the audience is asked to endure the wantonly far-fetched spillage of blood for no reason other than the apparent advancement of a morality tale premised upon the variety of three-dimensional characters the script fails to yield. Outside of the most masochistic of societies, torture and murder do not alone equate to entertainment.
The final insult is the film’s brief political foray into a privacy-themed lecture seemingly scripted by the American Civil Liberties Union. In Spider-Man the interplay between power and responsibility was shoved down audiences’ throats; in Superman Returns we were deprived of a “the American way” because at least once screenwriter was apparently feeling more cosmopolitan than nationalistic. In The Dark Knight the sermon is, fortunately, less obvious, though such is not to say that any socially literate audience member could miss it. The point advanced – the alleged pitfalls of pervasive wiretapping – bears no genuine relation to the overall cinematic arc and seems inserted for the sake of argumentative advancement alone.
Sadly, comic book tales simply are not the place for such political rhetoric – even if they make every effort to disclaim their comic book roots.






















