The Dark Knight - Battle Chess

The Dark Knight has to be the most complicated, grown up comic book movie yet.  It definitely puts Adam West and Burt Ward, not to mention Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher, in an alternate universe.  Although I wouldn't say that makes it more entertaining.

Watching this movie is like watching a chess game.  It is a psychological and physical assault, and it is almost interminable.  The Dark Knight clocks in at two hours and thirty-two minutes.  That's longer than Goodfellas.  And I don't understand why it had to be so long.  After all, it's not like they had to introduce Batman.  We know who Batman is.  And as far as the Joker goes, we know as much about him at the end as we do at the beginning.  No, what we have here is ambition.

Christopher Nolan, the director and writer, has recreated a villain that was once funny, and is now a sociopath with a talent for mind games.  There's nothing to laugh at here.  In the Joker's first scene, he makes a pencil disappear by burying it in the forehead of one of his fellow evildoers.  This is not a movie for children.  The Joker has gathered all of the thugs, gangsters and drug dealers in Gotham to propose a plan.  He will rid the world of Batman in exchange for half their fortune.  Simple enough.  So the rest of the movie will deal with the Joker luring Batman into his traps, and it will climax in a duel to the death.  Not quite.

The Dark Knight is concerned with more than heroes and villains.  It is concerned with how the public views a vigilante hero who brings villains out of the woodwork to challenge him, with civilian casualties often the result.  It is concerned with what it views as the real heroes of any major city - the commanders of the police force and the district attorneys - who have to deal with the increasingly violent criminals when Batman is not around.  I mean, what happens when a  psychopathic juggernaut like the Joker rallies the loonies and the bad guys together to attack the unstable public image of Batman by basically saying, "If Batman wasn't here, then we wouldn't be."?  So that makes Batman part of the problem.

This is only the beginning of the mind game the Joker plays on Batman.  He makes Batman choose, on more than one occasion, between one life or another, between one identity or another.  There is always a choice.  It is never a matter of a physical confrontation between the two, and that makes The Dark Knight far more interesting than your normal, everyday comic book movie where the good guy and the bad guy pound the shit out of each other until the good guy pulls through in the end, and the bad guy gets blown up or incinerated or falls from a great height.  That is not to say the entire film is waged on a mind field.  There are car chases and fist fights and gun battles, and cars and buildings blow up.  But all this stuff takes a back seat to the psychological warfare, as the Joker not only draws Batman onto the playing field, but also district attorney Harvey Dent, police commissioner Gordon, and Dent's new squeeze (and Batman's former squeeze) Rachel Dawes.

Much has been said about Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker, and it is a good one.  There are several sequences where his portrayal of lunacy is sheer genius.  As he is about to be run down by the Batpod (Batman's motorcycle), and on several other occasions when he is on the brink of death, you can tell that he desires punishment, brutality, and an unfashionable death, and that nothing would satisfy him more than for the city's hero to commit them.  So Batman can't even win by killing him, and you certainly can't beat a man into submission when he's laughing at you and begging for more.

There are flaws in this movie.  It is definitely not perfect.  A lot of it has to do with its running time.  It is far longer than it needs to be, and the plot starts to repeat itself after awhile.  Sure, it builds to a satisfactory climax, with multiple levels of suspense going on at once - Batman fighting the Joker, the police rescuing hostages, and a ticking clock counting down to an explosion.   The problem is, this is just a more complicated version of an earlier scene that had a ticking clock and the police in pursuit of one person and Batman another.  Forgive me for saying this Hollywood, but it could have been scaled down.  And the character of Two Face is introduced way too late in the proceedings to be of any effect.  He complicates an already complicated climax, and instead of being a tragic figure - which is what they were aiming for - he becomes a disposable plot point.  At that point, the movie had already built the Joker into this unstoppable force, and to introduce Two Face as one of his pawns is interesting, and it was the right decision to make, but they should have saved the confrontation between Two Face and Batman for the third film.  It is enough that Harvey Dent has lost his mind and gone over to the dark side after being, for so long, the symbol of the legal, lawful pursuit of criminals in the public eye.  Once again, as with Batman Returns and Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, two villains are worse than one.

These are minor squabbles, and The Dark Knight is still far more ambitious and satisfactory a sequel than I had anticipated.  You don't expect this kind of film in the summer.  It puts to shame nearly everything around it by using its mind to challenge you instead of its effects budget.  It's not often the characters in a comic book movie have to make a sacrifice in which someone dies no matter what decision they make.  It's not often in a movie for the credits to role over a tarnished hero, and to leave you in doubt he will ever consider himself a hero again.