‘The Dark Knight’ | 3 stars
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star
The Dark Knight” is a good — not great — superhero movie that crams as many ideas into its 2 1/2 hours as it can and still be considered a summer action picture.
All those ideas, though, come with a cost. Namely that with the exception of the late Heath Ledger’s iconoclastic Joker there’s not a character in this film you really care about.
Writer/director Christopher Nolan is nothing if not ambitious in this follow-up to his “Batman Begins.” Here he melds the comic book movie with the dark sensibilities of “L.A. Confidential,” attempting nothing less than an epic about the underbelly of the urban environment as filtered through a post-9/11 sensibility.
As the movie begins Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has Gotham City’s criminals on the ropes. But it hasn’t been easy. Wayne’s brutal nocturnal exploits have spawned a wave of copycat vigilantes and isolated the billionaire from normal life. Paramour Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes) has drifted into the arms of the city’s squeaky-clean, tough-on-crime DA, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).
Now Wayne is wondering if it isn’t time to hang up his cape and retire his ethically ambiguous alter ego. Let Dent take over the war on crime. Due process and all of that.
Enter the Joker, who seizes control of Gotham’s gangs and institutes a reign of terror that he will curtail only when Batman is unmasked.
In Ledger’s hands this iconic character takes on entire new dimensions. His face caked with peeling pancake white, his scraggly blond hair sporting green highlights, his scarred mouth a smear of red, his eyes buried in pools of runny eyeliner, this Joker is less joke than nightmare.
He’s not motivated by money or power or sex or politics or hate. His only pleasure is to create chaos and to devise fiendish plots that leave Batman, Dent and even Gotham’s common citizens facing damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t choices.
He isn’t afraid of death or pain or imprisonment. And as Bruce Wayne’s butler, Alfred (Michael Caine), observes, the Joker can’t be reasoned or negotiated with. He only wants to see the world burn.
Ledger is flat-out scary here, but scary with a wickedly funny streak. He’s an anarchist who believes he represents the truth “civilized” people would rather ignore.
“I’m not a monster,” he coos. “I’m just ahead of the curve.”
And he sees himself as the Caped Crusader’s ethical twin.
“You complete me,” he tells Batman in a parody of Tom Cruise’s line in “Jerry Maguire.” And he means it.
Ledger is so riveting here (expect a posthumous Oscar nomination) that the other performances feel like afterthoughts.
That includes the work of Bale, whose Bruce Wayne is sullen and unlikable and who, when in costume, speaks in an electronically enhanced rasp that is less effective than just affected.
Eckhart’s Dent is a square-jawed good guy but a bit too colorless for my taste — at least until a third-act tragedy. And Gyllenhaal’s Rachel is, well, forgettable.
In fact, one of the film’s major disappointments is the Bruce/Rachel/Harvey love triangle. It’s not sexy or romantic or bittersweet. It’s a plot device.
But then this is the Joker’s movie … everyone else is just along for the ride. That includes Caine, Morgan Freeman as Wayne Enterprises inventor Lucius Fox, Eric Roberts as a mob boss and Chin Han as an underworld financier.
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