Film Review: The Dark Knight

After having spent the last 24 hours sporadically sifting through my jumble of impressions of the biggest movie of the year to date, there is one nagging conclusion that I’m constantly having to come back around to: although it’s a mostly decent and intermittently great summer event, The Dark Knight is colossally overrated.

First things first in this (mostly) spoiler-free take, though – let’s get the high points out of the way. In a sensitive, concerted effort to not beat the dead horse, the late Heath Ledger positively astonishes in his role as the Joker. Director Christopher Nolan and his brother (and co-screenwriter) Jonathan ultimately settled on a significantly more sinister take of the character; a convincingly deranged and cheerlessly brutal psychopath with an unnerving penchant for knife-inflicted torment. Although Ledger’s Joker does his best to sell you his self-proclaimed responsibilities as an ambassador of chaos, his performance throughout the movie betrays something much more meticulously crafted at play. All aspects of the performance were unquestionably products of fastidious design – everything from his cobbled swagger, his deliberately slurred enunciation, and the paralyzing dread that materializes every time that crimson, razor-blade sneer blossoms from scar tissue to scar tissue – and they all go to incredible lengths to create a compellingly threatening presence.

Likewise, Aaron Eckhart is also onboard to turn in a similarly provocative depiction as Gotham City’s new hotshot District Attorney, Harvey Dent. The show-stopping honors may very well be in Ledger’s name, but audiences would be hard-pressed not to find anything as equally engaging about Dent’s candor and winsome sense of righteousness. Even as his lopsided resolve regarding justice and heroism progressively traipses closer and closer to naïveté, it’s still difficult to not get swept away by the sheer enormity of Dent’s earnestness and seemingly unwavering conviction. Simply put, Eckhart’s Harvey Dent is as close as the script could possibly get to the archetypal “white knight” without drowning itself in a deluge of camp – and in a bleak tale that practically hinges on the classical dualities of good and evil, that is truly a sight to behold.

Unfortunately, that’s where most of the consistently decent qualities about The Dark Knight end.

Although there isn’t any singular component that is outright detrimental to the movie as a whole, it’s the minutiae of minor issues and obstacles that the film accumulates over a sometimes glacial, other times excruciating 3-hour running time that keeps it from being the masterpiece many are claiming it to be. My first gripe has to do with the condensed focus on both Christian Bale’s Batman and Bruce Wayne. It was easy to predict this outcome based on the unbridled anticipation for the Ledger’s interpretation of the Joker, but it became increasingly problematic to even sympathize with his character as emphasis on his internal struggles were sidelined in favor of developing other, more prominent subplots. In Batman Begins, Bale was able to articulate a huge array of emotions through his stoic silence, selective speech, and expressive body language; unsurprisingly, Bruce Wayne’s more meditative moments in The Dark Knight is where he is in his finest form. Regrettably, the majority of Bale’s scenes are in costume where he seems even stiffer and more lumbering than before. Stripped of Bale’s facial expression assets, one of the most sympathetic characters in comic book history is reduced to nothing more than an anonymous figure in a cape and cowl, complete with a distracting gravelly rasp.

Elsewhere, Batman’s mythical dominance in combat comes off as muted throughout much of the movie, as Nolan unwittingly carries on Hollywood’s tradition of perpetuating the worst brand of fight cinematography on the face of the planet. Entire combat sequences are suffocated by series of jarring cuts, split-second angle changes and extreme, claustrophobic close-ups to the action. This tactic is usually deployed in order to mask the lack of actual hand-to-hand combat experience of actors and stuntmen, and to simulate the presence of choreography. This style worked to Batman’s favor in Batman Begins, as his approach for most of the movie depended upon swiftness and stealth; all the quick edits worked well in creating an illusion of Batman’s silent, deadly omnipresence. Conversely, very little of that element is seen in The Dark Knight, as what we’re offered instead is Batman nonchalantly dive-bombing through at least two different windows and brutishly tackling packs of goons head-on. If we’re going to be treated to an out-in-the-open rumble with one of fiction’s greatest martial artists systematically devastating hordes of faceless henchmen, someone with a wide-angle lens and an eye for panoramic poetry needs to be filming it.

The most taxing aspect about this editing style is that the logic of stretches of scenes feels like they’re lost in the shuffle. This is most evident in the fight scene preceding Batman’s final encounter with the Joker, where a jumble of dark, schizophrenic images inexplicably lead to the defeat of Joker’s henchmen, the freeing of the hostages, and an entire SWAT team dangling from the side of a building – all courtesy of our favorite masked vigilante in a matter of mere, incomprehensible seconds.

The Dark Knight’s most glaring shortcomings become palpable when things get thematically convoluted. On paper, the juxtaposition of Harvey Dent with both Batman and the Joker as a series of events moves him from one end of the moral spectrum to the other is easily the most fascinating arc simmering beneath the surface of the story. Theoretically, even the most principled, upstanding citizens of society can succumb to the pitfalls of evil. However, it is in the execution where this concept stalls out: the motivating factors which ultimately clinch Dent’s transformation into the murderous Two-Face as well as his subsequent descent into illogical madness simply aren’t very believable. Even worse is the contrived moral dilemma that tech specialist Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) confronts Bruce Wayne with when he’s faced with the decision of invading the privacy of 30 million Gotham citizens in order to pinpoint the location of the Joker. This impasse could have been effective if the entire scene didn’t feel as if it were completely glossed over – there just weren’t any real consequences to justify the needlessly high drama of this scene.

The biggest qualm I have with Nolan’s intentions in making a brainy (albeit ham-fisted) summer spectacle comes at the end of the film, where Batman has apparently pegged every last possible nuance of masked heroism and vigilantism in the span of four villains. Here, Batman speaks with an unrealistic amount of foresight (something which took scribes decades to flesh out and his comic book alter ego an equal amount of time to realize), and the soul of an entire mythology is breathlessly compressed into a few lines of forced dialogue. The fear and anxiety that has supposedly gripped the public as a result of Batman’s presence is something that’s referenced, but sans the pathetically scant press conference scene it’s never once fully conveyed. This is the primary oversight that further sabotages the emotional impact of Batman’s greatest decision: to take the fall for crimes he didn’t commit in order to protect the heroic reputation of another. It’s a noble but ultimately hollow conceit.

As a film endeavor that straddles the line between summer blockbuster and intellectual art-house fodder, The Dark Knight indubitably draws enough from both schools of thought to satisfy a slew of happy customers. At the end of the day, though, the combined salvo of Christopher Nolan's bloated psychoanalytical character examinations and thematic identity crises is clearly indicative of an ambitious director trying to messily cram way too many layers into a grueling 3-hour test of cerebral endurance. There are too many missteps and botched opportunities for this to be the best movie of the year, or even the best comic book adaptation ever. Fortunately, you don’t always have to be the best to be entertaining, and that’s at least something this flick has in spades.

Get on those counterpoints, Ryan!