You wanna know how I got these scars?
I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight last night with K.L. (As a side note, K.L. and I had dinner after the fact at the Elephant Bar, the place where we had our first dinner together.) The odds of me actually seeing a movie I’m dying to see anywhere near opening day are pretty slim and this one was no exception. I still haven’t seen Iron Man and I didn’t see Batman Begins until it was released on DVD. Being the filthy critic that I am and because I haven’t really been able to discuss it with anyone, this will be a sort of review of the movie. Let me just say, if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t read this.
When I first heard that Christian Bale was playing Batman in Batman Begins, I was really excited. When I saw the infamous business card scene from American Psycho I was totally impressed with him as an actor and in subsequent films I’ve found that I really like him. There was some added icing too. Gary Oldman is another favorite of mine and he was an excellent Jim Gordon. Michael Cane was also a wonderful addition as Alfred. I could have done without Katie Holmes but, frankly, if she’s wearing clothing and talking I can always do without Katie Holmes.
My prior jubilation at the casting for Batman Begins is quite the contrast to how I felt when I heard that Heath Ledger had been cast as The Joker in the sequel. It’s not that I don’t like Heath Ledger—on the contrary, I’ve liked him in every movie I’ve seen him in since seeing him in The Patriot—it’s just that he didn’t seem like the right guy to play The Joker, one of my absolute favorite comic villains. His last headlining role had been that of a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain. That was not the image I wanted superimposed onto The Joker. I began to worry even more about this role as a result of Ledger’s death and all the talk about an Oscar. Death immortalizes celebrities and, somehow, makes everything they did better. James Dean is an excellent example of what death will do for a celebrity. With Ledger’s death, the Hollywood whores ramped up the hype machine to ridiculous proportions.
That aside, Aaron Eckhart has been another personal favorite of mine since I saw Thank You For Smoking and Suspect Zero. As such, I was excited about his role as Harvey Dent and Two-Face—my other favorite Batman villain.
While I approached Batman Begins with nothing but high hopes and total excitement, I was far more skeptical about The Dark Knight. Could it live up the first? Could it live up to the hype? Could Ledger pull off The Joker and was his performance truly iconic or merely whitewashed by the actor’s untimely death?
The Dark Knight was a solid movie and I enjoyed most of it. If you haven’t seen it, I’d most certainly recommend it. (Of course, if you haven’t seen it, you shouldn’t be reading this.) With that said, however, I think in many respects this movie was a victim of its own hype and in general, I thought Batman Begins was a superior film overall. This is not to say that The Dark Knight was not a worthy successor, but it had some problems that were really hard to look past and turned a movie and cast with the potential to be a perfect 10 into something more like a 7.5 or an 8. That’s nothing to fret about, but the worst part about The Dark Knight is what it could have been.
Let’s begin with the bad.
I doubt I’m the first to say it, so I’ll simply repeat: the last quarter of the movie was the weakest and the ending was mostly contrived, at least on The Joker’s part. It was far too much of a leap for me and, even worse, felt like it was trying entirely too hard to force the general theme of the movie down our collective throats. Two-Face is a walking theme. The good and evil nature inside everything had already been covered. Seriously, we got it. However, instead of leaving it at that, the writers had to end the movie with what I felt was silly and unrealistic. Yes, I get that it’s a comic book based movie and as such was not exactly going for perfect realism. However, the themes about morality and humanity are exaggerated by super heroes and villains. The people around these characters are usually pretty real and mundane.
The plot arc involving the two ferries, one filled with criminals and the other filled with regular citizens was ridiculous. While this was a perfect social experiment for The Joker, it had no place in a Batman movie. Why? It couldn’t end realistically in a Batman movie, that’s why. Even in a movie as dark as this one, Batman will win in the end and while the villains have to rack up a bit of a body count, you’re not going to see an entire ferry full of innocent people die. It’s just not going to happen. Villains can kill as many rival criminals as they like and opposing cops, half of whom are corrupt, as well. However, there’s a pretty strict limitation on innocents.
The ferry filled with criminals was particularly annoying. Here is a ship full of the most brutal and dangerous criminals in the city—murders, sociopaths, the whole nine yards. There was no riot. There was no fight for the detonator. In fact, the criminals seemed to have more humanity than the “innocents.” It was totally contrived. I realize the scene where the big guy comes forward and says, “I’m doing something you should have done a long time ago,” was supposed to inspire us or make us think, “Wow, there really is humanity in everyone,” but it was just silly. This is the same city full of people who were trying to kill Coleman Reese the day before in order to save a hospital.
Did I mention this portion of the plot was contrived? It was contrived. It should have been a nail biter, but anyone with half a brain knew what as going to happen. For something in a super hero movie to work like that you have to be willing to do one of three things: break from the comic and kill some major character that still lives in the comic (and this was executed very poorly in the third X-Men movie), have a major character in the movie that’s not in the comics that could live or die or put the super hero in some kind of position that isn’t so catastrophic that he can still fail and the movie will be a winner for the good guys anyway.
Since we already know how things are going to turn out, the movie didn’t need to go overboard on making an unrealistic statement about the inherent goodness of the people on the boats. I didn’t care for it at all and, frankly, would have been all too happy to see the “innocents” blow the criminals up. It would have made for a better movie in my opinion and would have worked with the rest of the dark themes. It also would have been very unexpected. At the very end you are left with the idea that a vengeful city needs someone to blame and Batman is left with that blame. So are these people good or bad or what? Basically, they’re made saints at one point and in the end, it felt far more realistic. So who is the real Gotham? It felt very mixed.
And I hinted at it before, but “killing off” Jim Gordon was silly. We knew he wasn’t dead. Thanks for playing.
Then there was the scene where the cops were escorting Harvey Dent and there was a flaming bus blocking their path. With no cars on the street at all do you:
- Simply head over to the opposite side of the street since you have sirens to divert any oncoming traffic if there was some.
- Just stop there and wait for the obstruction to be cleared.
- Head down into the vicious underground where there is an obvious trap.
I guess in Gotham, the dumbest idea is usually the best idea since it is essential for more contrived plot. Ugh. Again, this is base on a comic book, but it’s really annoying when something is so bad that it gets you to stop suspending disbelief.
Batman struck me as a bit of a wuss in this movie. Maybe it was just me, but I was so enthralled by The Joker and by Harvey Dent that Batman started to feel kind of like an accessory halfway through the movie and I really didn’t much care either way what happened to him. He was simply the least interesting of the main characters. And that turned out to be my main problem with the movie, it didn’t know if it wanted to be a psychological thriller—focusing on interesting and intelligent villains and constantly feeling unsure about what was going to happen next—or a cookie-cutter action film where the hero conjures a magical cellphone sonar device to find the villain at the end just in time. (Obviously, I didn’t care for that either.)
Finally, what the hell was up the mayor in that movie? Was it just me or was he wearing a ridiculous amount of eye liner through the whole film?
Well, sounds like I hated it, eh? I didn’t though, so let’s move on to the good.
Health Ledger was truly iconic as The Joker. His particular interpretation was gripping and interesting. The way he handled his voice, the way he moved and even little details, like the way he kept licking his lips and around his mouth has he talked. Mind you, it’s unfair to give Ledger all the credit for a character that I couldn’t get enough of over the course of the movie. The makeup and concept design were fantastic, his costumes were gritty and the writing was very good. I cannot say enough about how much I liked this character and, strangely, it was my liking of this character that hurt the rest of the movie. I wanted The Joker to win. I thought his completely amoral manifesto of sorts was interesting and that, in the real world, his social experiment would have been successful. In the end, the shortcomings of this movie all bothered me in that they seemed to partially “waste” an excellent character with an equally excellent performance.
I have read a few negative reviews about Ledger’s performance here and there and I have to say that the people who didn’t like his performance fit into one of three groups:
- Film snobs of the worst kind who hate everything.
- People reacting in a knee-jerk fashion to all the hype surrounding this movie.
- Anti-trend jackasses who want to hate the character and performance because everyone else loves him.
Clearly, none of these people are to be taken seriously.
Aaron Eckhart did not disappoint as Harvey Dent or as Two-Face. I think that, unfortunately, as a result of Health Ledger’s performance that Eckhart’s will most certainly be overshadowed, but I can’t give him enough credit for carrying this role and carrying it well. Let me also emphasize Harvey Dent—this character was plenty interesting long before half of his face looked like a fried drumstick.
Maggie Gyllenhaal was so much better as Rachel Dawes than Katie Holmes. Sorry Katie, but you married Tom Cruise and as such no one can ever or will ever take you seriously in a role where you play an intelligent character. It’s not our fault you drink proverbial Kool-Aid. Gyllenhaal was much more believable and simply seemed to have much more depth than her predecessor. The only point in the entire movie where I missed Holmes was the point at which Ms. Dawes was being blown to smithereens. I was thinking, “That would have been a much better scene with Katie Holmes. An explosion and then… silence.”
Overall the plot was pretty good for a comic book movie, despite all my nitpicking above. I enjoyed it and would see it again. I’ll get it when it’s released on DVD. What more could a movie really want? The downside is that I felt this movie could have been more and it even had the right ingredients. It just… didn’t. It had an identity crisis that wasn’t as interesting as Harvey Dent’s, that’s all.