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Batman - The Dark Knight - Thoughts From A Day After
By Bill | July 21, 2008 | Email This Post
I thought I’d take a break from the usual fare today and give a brief review of the new Christian Bale and Heath Ledger Batman movie, The Dark Knight. No meaningful spoilers.
I’m generally not a comic book movie person; for instance, after seeing the Fantastic Four movies I wished I’d poked my own eyes out first. Still, some rise above the rest, and the Batman series has historically been one of the better efforts - at least, the first two Burton movies and the reboot of the franchise with Batman Begins have been worth seeing. Plus I do like big event type movies, so while I wasn’t there at midnight, I did take the trouble to catch a reasonable early day-after showing of The Dark Knight.
Verdict: It’s good. Very good.
You’ve heard the best part by now, of course: Heath Ledger. His performance is everything it was rumored to be… simply brilliant. I started the movie wondering how I’d be able to forget Jack Nicholson’s performance long enough to give Heath a fair appraisal, but honestly I’d forgotten about that question twenty seconds into his first screen appearance. He’s that good… Oscar-territory type stuff. (He probably won’t actually have a fighting chance because of the type of movie The Dark Knight is, but that will be the shortsightedness of the Academy voters, not a failure of Heath Ledger.) Heath’s performance is more akin to Malcolm MacDowell’s in A Clockwork Orange than to Jack’s earlier Joker.
The other actors are much more spotty.
- Christian Bale either completely tanks or is completely brilliant, I can’t decide which. Batman is, of course, hidden behind the mask, and the Bruce Wayne mindless playboy stuff is right on - but I can’t decide if it’s acting. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and give him a pass here.
- Gary Oldman is never, ever bad.
- Michael Caine is also never, ever bad (he won’t hesitate to be in some awful movies, though.)
- Morgan Freeman is fine, but has little to work with.
- Aaron Eckhart is as good as he has to be, but not much more. His performance put me in mind of a slightly younger Bill Pullman.
- Maggie Gyllenhaal was the real surprise for me. Sure, I could watch her do her sexy girlfriend walk around Bruce’s party all night, but I’ve got to say I never thought I was watching anything but someone playing a part. I’d expected more from her.
Overall, I’d rank this easily as the most substantial member of the Batman franchise, the only one that aspires to actually be called a film rather than a summer movie. I don’t know if it quite makes it, but it doesn’t fall terribly short, either.
The primary characters - both Batman and the Joker - are much more than the standard cardboard cutout superheroes (or supervillains) … both have reasonably believable motivation, and the stereotypical banter back and forth (e.g., “You’re more like me than you want to admit!”) is done rather better than it usually is. There are several ethical dilemmas and philosophical points along the way that are at least worth considering, even if only during late night debate sessions among friends, and that adds a depth to the movie that the others in the series lacked.
Is it perfect? No. This is partially due to several things:
- First up, the movie gets ridiculously gadget-happy at times. Batman was always one of the darker comic book heroes (at least for his original era) and the movie is at its best when it’s dealing with character development and motivation. The technology has long been an important aspect, but it ought to be window dressing, not integral to the story. For example, the Bat-cycle was a stupid, pointless, unnecessary addition and will forever remain a bad idea. (It should be noted that, in the theater I attended, a large number of the audience actually applauded the bike at one point, so I could be culturally way off-base on this one; that doesn’t, however, make me wrong.) There’s also an extremely silly bit in Hong Kong that tears the fabric of the movie for a while.
- The dialog needed polishing at a couple of points. There’s the usual a-real-conversation-would-have-used-a-contraction-there stuff (e.g., “I will be seeing you” instead of “I’ll be seeing you”) but there’s one particularly lumbering piece of expositional dialog right at the end. One other grating moment was when Morgan Freemen gets to do a little bit of blatant political grandstanding, which was distracting.
- A couple spots look like there was some editing for length, and the scenes suffered for it. It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of the closet for the DVD.
- There are one or two ham handed comic moments that don’t really fit the mood of the movie (picture the ubiquitous action movie street drunk who happens to see a hero do something fantastic and mutters a confused “huh?”)
But that’s all quibbling, knocking the movie from something in 9.6 territory down to maybe a 9.2, and most of that’s because of the gadget idiocy. All in all, very much worth seeing… in fact, it’s the first movie in I can’t remember when that I wanted to go see again the very same day. I can’t wait to see what Christopher Nolan does with the next one.
Other notes: there were FAR too many previews, most of them completely forgettable. Watchmen looks good; Death Race looks terrible. The theater next door was showing Mama Mia! … the plot escapes me, but I think it has something to do with Meryl Streep having to decide which member of Abba to give to Nazi prison guards. Turns out there’s no wrong choice.
Topics: Movies |