The Dark Knight

TedFlicks Rating:

$4.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $10.50.

“A morality play in a superhero mask.”

WHERE IS THE OLD BATMOBILE WHEN YOU NEED IT

The July 8 screening of Warner Bros.’ “The Dark Knight” at the DGA Theater in New York was monitored by obnoxious security thugs who treated a professional screening audience worse than a convention of DVD pirates.  They need not have bothered

At two and one half hours, “The Dark Knight” is a great muddle of equivocal morality masquerading as a superhero skein.  Helmer (and co-writer) Christopher Nolan’s sequel to “Batman Begins” falls victim to a curse common to attempts to build a franchise:  It has no compelling story.

Instead, it throws a filmmaker’s bag of tricks at a screenplay that is too long by an hour and lacks dramatic tension, except at moments.  The tricks come in the form of plot twists, largely incomprehensible because their visual clues are buried under special effects and their dialogue clues are buried under a pumped up soundtrack.  That is too bad, because stripped of some silly subplots, “The Dark Knight” has the germ of a satisfying comic book flick.

The first rule of superheroes is that the superhero is the guy with the super powers.  The only other guy who has super powers is the bad guy.  Civilians do not have super powers.  If they did, there would be no need for a super hero.  The genius of the genre is to suspend disbelief so far as the super hero and the bad guy are concerned while maintaining it with regard to civilians.  This is where “The Dark Knight” falls down.  Too many civilians survive explosions, car crashes, and assassination attempts that should have killed them because they don’t have super powers.

The plot, to the extent that it is comprehensible, is this:  After a few years of cleaning up Gotham (which is supposed to be New York but location shots are all Chicago) Batman (Christian Bale) is having second thoughts.  Using criminal tactics to catch criminals may turn him into one.  He also wants to marry his love interest, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, terribly miscast).  She won’t have him until he gives up the cape and mask.  Into this frittata toss The Joker (the late Heath Ledger) with a scheme to take over what is left of Gotham’s mob headed by Salvatore Maroni (convincingly played by Eric Roberts).  Add a good looking Rudi Giuliani type (how’s that for an oxymoron?) as crusading DA Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) who gains the confidence of Batman and alter ego Bruce Wayne despite having stolen his girlfriend, and you have the recipe for the end of the Batman saga.  Predictably The Joker is the fly in Batman’s retirement ointment.  Without Batman’s help, cops can’t prevent the self-described agent of chaos from turning Gotham into a war zone – and from keeping Batman in costume.

Aided by valet Alfred Pennyworth (Sir Michael Caine) in “justify the firebombing of Dresden” mode and conscience stricken CEO (Morgan Freeman) Batman suits up again.  It would have been better if he had not.  Everything about this picture reeks overload.  Moral dilemmas are not subtly revealed in the action.  They are hammered home in the dialogue.  Handsome DA Harvey Dent becomes the allegory for the faces of good and evil in a totally preposterous plot twist.  The Joker stops in the middle of a kill to explain his motivations to Batman.  Even the once sleek Batmobile looks now like a Hummer after being sat on by an elephant.  Give us a break!

A word about Heath Ledger:  It is too bad that his penultimate featured role should be The Joker.  He is totally competent, but in Jack Nicholson he has a tough act to follow.  He comes across more like Christian Slater in “Heathers” than like the cinematic master of madness, whose work he appears to have studied to some effect.  With the exceptions of veterans Caine and Freeman, performances fall victim to special effects, some of which are a tad cheesy.  Tech credits range from adequate to sub-par.  Music by James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer is lugubrious at best.

Ultimately, “The Dark Knight” will depend on an adult audience for its success.  Despite its PG-13 rating, its lumbering razzle-dazzle and morality play could bore children to death.

—30—

Tron: Legacy on Netflix