THE DARK KNIGHT - Too Long to Be Perfect

I was really excited for THE DARK KNIGHT.  The first Chris Nolan Batman film was amazing -- a great mix of casting (except for Katie Holmes), theme, story, and action.  They really nailed the tortured nature of the Batman mythos and how he's not quite a regular superhero and just short of being a vigilante.

SPOILERS SMACKING YOU UPSIDE THE HEAD BELOW...

DK has its brilliant moments.  All of the Joker stuff is amazing.  Jonah (Jonathan) Nolan's script makes several great choices -- not giving him a backstory because he's just a random psychopath, introducing him in the midst of a great, twisty 70s-style heist scene, and unleashing him as an agent of chaos determined to plague the Batman and watch Gotham City burn.  Christian Bale is great as always, and the casting is even better this time around, ditching Katie Holmes for the far-superior Maggie Gyllenhall, and adding in Aaron Eckhart and Eric Roberts to the mix.

Where the film veers off the rails of greatness is mainly that it's too damn long and the length -- and all the plot the filmmakers cram into the last hour -- make the film suffer from a split personality (fitting in a way because of Harvey Dent, but frustrating dramatically).  The film has a natural endpoint -- in the hospital, when Harvey Dent is lying there scarred and the Joker comes in and hands him a gun and tells him to go cause chaos.  That's your Luke Skywalker with his robot hand at the end of EMPIRE STRIKES back.  The film should fade out there, and then the entire next film is about Harvey Dent as Two-Face -- his rise to villainy and his eventual death (and possible redemption).  Instead, Nolan and company cram an entire film's worth of plot into 45 minutes or an hour, giving short shrift to Harvey and his story.

And that's not the only thing that happens at the end of the movie -- we also get the Joker and his ferryboat bomb plot -- the one scene in the movie that rang really false for me.  The Joker's not out to prove everyone's crazy like him; he's just a nutjob out to shake things up.  And the moment when Tim "Tiny" Lister grabs the bomb and throws it overboard is just plain cheesy.

The other action scene that feels tonally off is when the Joker tells everyone to kill the dorky accountant who knows Batman's identity or he'll blow up a hospital.  As the film proves shortly thereafter with the disappointing ferryboat scene, regular people aren't killers.  So it doesn't really work to see construction workers and cops ready to gun down a guy in cold blood because their mothers are having hernia operations.

Thematically, the movie gets a little heavy handed with all the talk about Harvey Dent being the shining face of Gotham and its white knight.  I got it the first ten times I heard it, I didn't need the other 75.  And he can't be such a white knight if he's willing to shoot a man in the head to find out where his girlfriend is being kept.

With a little focus and editorial strictness, THE DARK KNIGHT could have been the best superhero film of all time.  As it is, it's a solid B.