Why so serious?

I went and saw Batman: The Dark Knight yesterday after hearing nothing but good things about it. For the first part, I was amazed. Heath Ledger’s Joker is fantastic. But after I realised that a) 90% of the movie was about the Joker and b) there’s really nothing except the Joker, my interest level kinda dropped.

The movie’s main problem is…well…Batman is barely in it! He appears unmasked in about three scenes. He gets perhaps 20 lines in total. Most of the movie is about the Joker, with a side helping of Harvey Dent aka Two Face (who is so unlikeable you almost can’t wait for bad things to start happening to him). It’s like watching a Rocky movie where Rocky Balboa has a 10-minute cameo.

There was good stuff, of course. The scene involving the fake Batmen was quite clever (“What’s the difference between you and me?” “I’m not wearing hockey pads.”) As a bit of Bat-trivia, Batman never uses guns. Indeed, he has only pulled a gun on a criminal once (see the first episode of “Batman Beyond”), and that was enough to cause him to retire in shame. As soon as I saw a guy in a Batman suit charging forward with a machinegun, I knew he was fake. Other good parts were the scenes with Gordon’s son (whom I’m sure will grow up to become Robin) and the final clash with Two-Face.

But back to the Joker: Heath Ledger has dispensed with the silly Joker of the first movie and now plays someone who looks like a cross between Sweeney Todd and Marilyn Manson. Mere words cannot describe how effective this character is. He’s not a goofy comic-book villain, he’s a psychopathic freak who thinks of murder the same way most people think of going to the bathroom. Another piece of trivia: during the movie the Joker tells two conflicting stories about how he got his scars. This is consistant with the personality of the Joker, who invents and fabricates past lives for himself until not even he is sure what the truth is.

Sadly, while the villains were great, the main characters were anything but. You have Harvey Dent, who is supposed to be a sympathetic character but comes across as a nominee for Knob of the Year Award, and Commissioner Gordon, who is a bit more tolerable but still annoying. And then there’s Rachel, who was unmemorable and generic beyond belief. Throughout the movie I was asking myself “hey wait, have I seen her before?….ah forget it.”

Overall, this movie was pretty weak.