Why..So...Serious? The Dark Knight is the hero we all need.
a movie buff, Read the comic before there was a movie
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JUL
20
2008
The Dark Knight —
As The Dark Knight begins, a scant year has passed since Bruce Wayne, in his guise as the Batman, plunged himself into Gotham City's war on crime and ruined the Scarecrow's attempt to eliminate the entire metropolis. The mob, who once owned the city are now mostly running scared from this masked vigilante. After all, with the help of Lt Gordon, he has come very close to cleaning up the city. But, all is not well. The public, you see, are ingrates. They don't really understand the Batman, so they are calling for his head. To make matters worse, he has spawned copy cats, guys who show up at crime scenes wearing homemade bat-suits. Only, they don't have the same training as Mr Wayne, so they tend to carry guns and shoot up the place.Now, an unknown, to this point, new criminal has just catapulted himself into the spotlight by robbing the mob's bank. These are the first scenes in the film, a spectacular bank robbery in broad daylight that sets into motion a series of events, some tragic, some comic, some shocking, that pluck us from our comfortable theater seats and plop us down smack in the middle of high drama with characters we come to care about. This ain't your Uncle Milty's comic-book super-hero movie.
The plot is simple enough. The mob can't operate "normally" because they have no idea how to deal with this vigilante, the Batman, who along with Lt Gordon (Gary Oldman) and the seemingly fearless new district attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, in his finest outing to date), has turned the tables on them. Enter the Joker.
The hype over Heath Ledger's last performance? Believe it. Deserved. This ain't your Uncle Jack's clown prince of crime, boys and girls. No, as embodied by Ledger, the Joker is a man without a soul, with no obvious motive. The most dangerous sort of man. One who, as our sage butler Alfred (Micheal Caine) observes, .."can't be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn." When he is on-screen, we find ourselves mesmerized and terrified at the same time.
Wearing clown make-up that seems smeared on by a little kid with finger paints rather than applied, Ledger's every little tick, every flick of his tongue, every halloweenish smile, is twinge-worthy and conjures the devil himself, a devil who's mind has slithered through the cracks of sanity. Yet, he's diabolically clever, as he pits the city against authority, the authorities against each other, and all of them against the Batman.
His sole purpose seems to be the humiliation of the good guys, as he targets Dent, Gordon and Bruce Wayne's former squeeze, Asst. DA Rachel Dawes, this time played by the excellent Maggie Gyllenhaal (a nice improvement over Katie Holmes). He plays these tricks with glee, under the guise of making the town safe for the mob again, yet we get the feeling he would do this just for the fun of it. One visceral scene has the Joker walking away from a hospital as he watches it blow up, turning occasionally to admire his handiwork, yet disaffected by its impact. He stops just long enough to make sure the button on his remote works to charge the final explosion, letting out an exasperated sigh of relief when it does.
Screenwriter brothers Christopher (who also directs) and Johnathan Nolan succeed masterfully at the work they started in the outstanding Batman Begins, turning the comic-book movie paradigm on its ear. Oh, they provide us with plenty of good guy/bad guy fighting, frantic chase scenes, and explosions, but they also drag us though the muck of human emotions behind the actions, humanizing these people as super-hero movies never do.
They plow head-on into the deep fears and traumas that cause two grown men to act out in such, uh, unusual fashion . Batman's encounter with cruel childhood tragedy is the force that drives him, and we know this because the first film thoroughly plowed that ground. Bruce Wayne is a rich, powerful man, yet a conflicted one. He's torn between avenging his parents' deaths, one mobster at a time, and finding a way to give up his cape and cowl to be with the woman he loves. Bale (best Batman. Ever.) gives a fine turn as he tries to choose, knowing he loves someone with all his heart, yet obligated to feed the demons raging inside his very soul. None of this gets easier as he finds himself barreling toward lines he thought he'd never cross, but knowing that crossing them might be the only way to stop a madman who has no boundaries.
Ledger's Joker comes from a similar place, yet a different sort of cruelty, which is probably why he acts out by destroying, where Bruce Wayne attempts to harness his dark side for good. Both are deeply troubled men, but Batman understands where his anger originates, unlike the Joker, who can't even keep the story of how he got his scars straight. He's a total loose cannon, self-described as "a dog chasing a car. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it!"
They don't stop there. Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Wayne's trusted design engineer, is drawn into a morally ambiguous situation involving spying on the entire city through their cell phones "for the greater good" and Harvey Dent's DA of fearless integrity spirals into the dark abyss of revenge as the result of a tragic event near the end of the film.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The Nolan brothers have pulled off the near impossible, marrying a highly entertaining thrill ride to an introspection of the human condition and, in doing so may have created a true masterpiece for the ages. That's right, The Dark Knight just may be the best super-hero movie ever made. Shoot, it might be one of the best movies. Ever. GRADE: A+
Last edited on Jul 23, 2008
The Dark Knight is recommended by MikeMaroon
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