“TO them, you’re just a freak – like me,” the Joker tells Batman
in “The Dark Knight.” The alienated Batman finds it difficult to
disagree. He takes a fierce stance in favor of untruth, surveillance
and (but?) the American way. “Batman has no limits,” is how Bruce
Wayne puts it, and there are two sides to that coin.
PHOTO GALLERY: The Dark Knight
PHOTO GALLERY: Dark Knight Premiere
The highest praise I can give a superhero movie is that it makes
me forget about its 10-cent-comic-book soul. “The Dark Knight,”
unlike its superior predecessor, has some absurdly improbable
scheming and sputtering one-liners. It also lacks the chord of
ancient evil found in “Batman Begins.”
But summer blockbusters don’t get much better than Batman on his
new mega-cycle barreling down a Gotham highway straight at the Joker
and his 18-wheeler, or the caped one hurling himself out of the
window of a skyscraper to first catch a falling body, then worry
about landing. When Batman needs to turn his bike around, he runs it
up the side of a building.
Not least among the welcome features of the new edition, which
ventures into shadowlands unknown to “Spider-Man” and the rest, is
its references to “the bat man,” a distancing touch. He’s not one of
us, someone you’re on a first-name basis with. He is a weird loner
who doesn’t care what you think of him. Batman is obsessed,
unrepentant and excessive. Batman is cool.
The hard-charging set pieces, photographed in extravagantly moody
splendor, come with implicit commentary on Guantanamo, wiretapping,
the indispensability of propaganda, the age of terrorism and faith.
There’s even a mention of the corrupting possibilities of health
care costs. “The Dark Knight” benches a lot of weight for an action
flick. It creates an experience either less fun or less silly,
depending on your taste, than, say, “Iron Man.”
Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne has lost his girl Rachel (Maggie
Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes) to the arms of the ambitious new
DA Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). Dent has the grin of an infomerical
pitchman but an impressive record of rounding up criminals, and
Batman considers handing over to him the leadership of the Gotham
crime-fighting business. That could carry the added benefit of
winning back his girl, who insists she can’t be with Bruce until
it’s no longer necessary for him to be Batman.
Enter a wild card.
Bale is nobody’s patsy. When Dent talks about attending a dance
performance with Rachel, Bale’s dry delivery neatly cuts him down
with the line, “So, you’re into ballet?”
Yet the picture is wholly owned by a cold-blooded Heath Ledger as
the asparagus-haired mountebank who robs banks, makes mobsters
tremble and seems to have seeded the entire city (an almost
undisguised Chicago) with explosives and double agents. (Why would
anyone work for him? The opening scene establishes that his
confederates have the life expectancy of Sea Monkeys.) Instead of
cackling his lines a la Nicholson, Ledger utters them like a naughty
third grader, his weirdness accentuated by a fantastically unnerving
score built on terror tones, like air-raid alarms or life-support
equipment. Occasionally he shakes his jowls, drunk on his own crazy
sauce. You know you’ve got skills when you can get a laugh out of
saying, “Hi!” Of one kidnappee, he says, “He may be in one spot or
several.” To the Dark Knight himself, he declares, “You complete
me.” Brokeback Batman.
At first, the Joker is tied in with a mob money-laundering plot
that seems far too small and bland for a hero of Batman’s
proportions.
What next: Batman vs. high gasoline prices?
There is also some dim dialogue (“Let’s not do that again,” “The
night is darkest just before the dawn,” “I didn’t sign up for
this”), and Gyllenhaal is jarring, making little effort to match
Holmes’ earnestness. It’s starting to look like Gyllenhaal can do
only one thing – saucy, smart-mouthed alterna-vixen. That might have
been fine if she had created the role.
In the second half, as the mobsters (headed by a blow-dried Eric
Roberts, overdoing it) fade from view, writer-director Christopher
Nolan has as much fun as the Joker, stringing his main characters
together with a series of tripwires. Commissioner Gordon (Gary
Oldman) is much more of a player this time, and there’s a major
disagreement between Batman and his tech expert (Morgan Freeman),
though Alfred (Michael Caine) doesn’t get enough to do.
As was true of the blundering Hancock in the comedy of the same
name, Batman can’t claim public love. His approval ratings are in
the tank. Maybe he should stop inviting terrorist attacks by being
such an inflexible anti-terrorist. Maybe he should be locked up
while people learn to live with the Joker. Isn’t it Batman’s fault
that cops have been killed in action?
“I’m a guy with simple tastes. I enjoy dynamite and gunpowder and
gasoline,” says the Joker. OK, and as for the turn-ons of Bachelor
No. 2, the Dark Knight has equally explosive interests. He sets up a
system for monitoring pretty much everyone, everywhere. “Beautiful,
isn’t it?” he says. That shuddery feeling going through the audience
doesn’t arise solely from Ledger’s death. Batman lives in a messy
world. If no one else is willing to make hard choices, he will.
THE DARK KNIGHT
Cold-blooded thriller
Running time: 153 minutes Rated PG-13 (disturbing images,
violence) At the Lincoln Square, the Union Square, the Kips Bay,
others