The Dull Knight

I went and saw the new Batman film Saturday night: The Dark Knight. The film of course has garnered a lot of attention due to the fact that it stars Heath Ledger who passed away earlier in this year. The Dark Knight will most likely be the most successful film out of the Batman Franchise thus far having taken an amazing $300 million in ten days (in the US alone) with some predicting that it may go on to challenge the box office supremo Titanic's taking of $600 million, over eleven years ago.

The film is magnificently shot. Apparently 30 minutes of the film was shot on IMAX cameras. The scenes done amongst the Hong Kong skyscrapers are gob-smacking. I almost felt like I was in an IMAX theatre.

The story starts off with a fantastic robbery scene in which Joker impersonators rob Gotham City's main bank. There is a new crime serge in town and Gotham City is determined to stop it. They call on Batman. The mob are rattled by the city's declaration to destroy them: they hire the Joker to kill Batman (Christian Bale) and anyone else who crosses their path. The spotlight is on The Joker. Heath Ledger is outstanding continually bubbling over with evil lunacy. I would however stop short of awarding him the "mesmerising performance" badge. It is a good performance and certainly leaves Jack Nicholson's more comical version of The Joker in the original Batman Film very much in the shade. At times though Ledger weirdly sounds like Maxwell Smart (1960s version); I kept expecting him to pick up his shoe and order a cab.

The last film Batman Begins was about the man behind Batman: Bruce Wayne. Christian Bale made him a passionate and complex person. You felt for him. You wanted him to win. In this film Bale seems to think such passion and complexity is created by continually speaking in a ridiculously husky voice as if he is appearing in a porn spoof. Batman is wooden and droll. In a nutshell he is about as charismatic as cardboard.

Ledger's Joker fills this charismatic black hole. As a result this film isn't about Batman at all. It's about The Joker. The audience ends up wanting the Joker to win; anything not to have old Bat face up there on the screen with his justice and his eyeliner. The Joker's narcissistic forms of violence become the true stars of the film. His victims are stuffed with grenades, shot point-blank in the head, filled with razors, butterfly-kissed with knives and set alight just for fun. The violence is relentless. Maggie Gyllenhaal challenges the Joker in the charisma stakes in her role as Batman's former girlfriend and the love interest of Gotham District Attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). Gyllenhaal is reminiscent of another era of movie star and if they ever do a biopic on Greta Garbo, she's the girl to do it. Unfortunately just as her part is getting interesting in the film, she is struck out, a victim no doubt of quite misogynist script editing. With all the chicks out of the picture, the big boys are then left to tear each other apart.

At 2 hours 40 minutes, this is a long film. About three quarters of the way through I had "so is this it?" realisation and the film started to lose me. Tim Burton's two Batman films (Batman and Batman Returns) are still my favourite simply because they were entertaining on every level. They were fantastically escapist, they had action but most importantly they still had a sense of humour. The Dark Knight in its attempt to be dark and mysterious through its extreme violence has taken all the fun away and become decidedly dull.

C