The Dark Knight
Rated PG-13. 152 minutes.
Sequel fantasy crime thriller.
Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman.Director: Christopher Nolan.
Miss ‘‘The Dark Knight?” Not on your bat-boots, you won’t. Shun if you will the ‘‘Cloak of Protection” T-shirts, the billion-dollar hooks (‘‘Whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you ... stranger”) and the hyperbolic early reviews (‘‘Mad! Crazy! Blazing!”). But sooner, at the multiplex, or later, in your own batdigs with a hot rental, you’ll be sucked into this movie. Resistance is futile.
‘‘The Dark Knight” has the pull factor of a black hole for as many reasons as the Caped One’s belt has bat doodads. Tick them off: an exhilarating swoop through comic book lore; satisfying production values; screen presence; apocalyptic grandeur; ‘‘Memento” director Christopher Nolan’s potent mix of Gothic giddiness, dead-serious civic messages and sensational action.
This can’t begin to touch on ‘‘The Dark Knight’s” story line, which opens with a heist on a mob bank, simultaneously introducing Gotham’s new bad-boy, The Joker (Heath Ledger), and signaling Batman’s plummeting esteem in the city he protects. Chubby copycat fan boys in homemade batsuits keep getting in the way of his crime fighting.
Christian Bale plays Batman again, masterfully, and the best faces from the previous installment ‘‘Batman Begins” are present: Alfred (Michael Caine) as Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), with Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) Batman’s ally on the Gotham police force. Love interest Rachel Dawes is now improved by Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Aaron Eckhart arrives as Gotham’s idealistic D.A. Harvey Dent, but it is Ledger’s Joker that notoriously steals the show. He’s a cavorting psychopath in Beetlejuice makeup, his tongue compulsively worrying the inside of his hideous (and badly sewn) leer, carved there by an insane parent.
The Joker’s ratcheting campaign, from crime to terrorism to the public debasement of Batman, forces alliances and tragic consequences. We’ve seen all that, but when was the last time we watched a sound-and-light show that combined adversaries in masks and goofy get-ups; palpable anguish over questions of identity, conscience and civic responsibility; and characters constantly groping for stability using Roman precedents? ‘‘V for Vendetta” came close.
The story’s dreadful coils and implications hardly prepare one for the movie’s clever cinema. For example, one sequence reveals, for maximum shock value, the extent of a character’s hideous maiming. Sometimes I couldn’t sort things out in all the audacious uproar. There’s hardly a way to tell when ‘‘The Dark Knight’s” ‘‘big duckeroo” – what an earlier movie Joker called the big climactic battle — begins or ends, except that it seems to begin about 10 minutes into the movie and doesn’t end until a wrung-out two and a half hours later. The reverberations, however, go on much longer.
