The Dark Knight: The IHC Review. The Joker Hearts Chaos [I Heart Movies]

Superhero movies just don’t get any better than this. The Dark Knight isn’t perfect, but it was pretty damn close. It is as close to an expertly crafted graphic novel as I’ve ever seen on the screen. It’s a perfect combination– a very rare combination of huge Hollywood summer blockbuster magic and explosions with late December Oscar bait laden with well-crafted story lines, incredible dialogue and completely engrossing characters. Kevin Smith has called The Dark Knight one of the best movies ever made and many have said that Heath Ledger deserves an Academy Award for his performance as Batman’s eternal nemesis and I would say both of those are accurate.

Now before I get too sappy and sentimental, The Dark Knight wasn’t without flaws. I would probably give it a 4.5 out of 5 or a 9 out of 10. The ending was in some ways a typical superhero franchise ending that only barely wraps things up before launching into the cliffhanger for the next chapter– there were times when Christian Bale’s extra raspy Batman voice seemed a little contrived and while Christoper Nolan did a great job pulling off a two-villain story, but maybe I’m missing something with Two Face not getting a fair shot at a sequel.  And Maggie Gyllenhaal was pretty good, about as good as you can do with a sort of a fluff character like Rachel Dawes, but at least it wasn’t Katie Holmes this time.  Holy crap, thank god for that.

But it’s all about Batman and the Joker, just as the Batman story should be. The Joker is Batman’s other half, the thing that Batman could have become after the murder of his parents but didn’t. He’s a bright and colorful clown to Batman’s black brooding nature. He’s the reason Batman keeps existing and the Batman is the reason the Joker exists and the two just can’t exist in the universe for long without each other. So it was good to see how much attention Nolan paid in his script to the complicated, symbiotic relationship between the two and how the Joker is constantly on the verge of pushing Batman straight over that crazy ledge into madness.  Without that, the character of Bruce Wayne would probably not change at all over time, but the Joker pushes him into new and darker realms.

But wait, no actually it’s all about the Joker and Harvey Dent. Harvey Dent is the white knight, who is such a force for good, such a crazy DA that it makes Batman pretty much useless. But in the process, he pisses off the underworld so bad that they go with the craziest bastard on the block, who just happens to be the guy who may not be the hero he wants to be or everyone wants. The subject of the hero, the vigilante and the super villain are examined here in great beauty.

But what about that Joker? Well, to compare Heath Ledger’s performance directly to Jack Nicholson’s in Tim Burton’s Batman would be a fallacy– they’re two different Jokers from two different times. Nicholson’s Joker is a white collar criminal, a relatively clean cut crime boss in his ivory tower who is crazy as hell and eccentric, but would rather have his thugs get their hands dirty if he can arrange it.  He’s a product of the 1980s– the evil corporate master in a nice suit and an ear to ear grin, hell bent on taking down society through our own desire to consume with the slogan “Who do ya trust?”.  Ledger’s joker is Frank Miller’s Joker– straight out of Arkham Asylum, absolutely loony, anarchic and doesn’t care a whit about anyone or anything other than his own sick pleasure and desire to see chaos and anarchy for the sake of it.  And he’s a Joker for the 2000s where the scariest thing is no longer a guy in a suit, but a nameless terrorist that’s outside of society’s well-ordered sense of rule and too brilliant and enigmatic to ever be brought to justice.  And Heath Ledger owns the role and the movie from the second he appears on screen until the very end.

And you’ll never see pencils in the same way again.

The Joker in the Dark Knight is not just a wacky guy in a purple suit. He’s not just a dangerous guy. He’s an absolute and utter storm of chaos in the same way that Batman is an unstoppable force of justice. The entire movie is a brilliant game of chess between Gotham’s two craziest men where plot twists come at you out of nowhere and still manage to not only make sense, but come together like a Shakespearean puzzle.

It was really fantastic seeing the crazy side of Batman, because make no mistake, he is crazy.  Michael Keaton did the crazy well and in Batman Begins, Christian Bale was more of the white knight than the dark knight, riding off into the sunset with his lady, but it appears now that Nolan is purposely doing a progression of the Batman and Bruce Wayne character from a two dimensional rich playboy to a much deeper and darker character that may eventually echo the balls-out crazy “I’m gonna rip your fucking throat out” Batman that pissed off so many fans when Frank Miller went that direction briefly.  But Bale, who played insane so well in American Psycho, does get to show it at times here and shows it well.

And Nolan has done a wonderful job of keeping it all real. This is not the 1960s Batman, not even the 1980s Batman. Somehow he’s made Batman into a vigilante in a cape and a mask that mainly doesn’t seem forced or contrived. Throughout the movie, Batman just feels like a normal presence in any city– “Oh yeah, that’s just our mythical ninja who kills the bad guys”. When he shows up, it takes no suspension of disbelief to see a guy in a black rubber and Kevlar suit standing around doing detective work.

Sure, there’s a ton of gadgets– sometimes it seems like one too many, but you can’t separate Batman and super high-tech gadgetry any more than you can separate Spiderman from ropes of spider web.  Bruce Wayne is all human and relies on his gadgetry to maintain an edge on the bad guys and to maintain his otherwordly and god-like mystique.

Yes, there are some political questions about how far democracy and the rightful rule of law can go to stop those who don’t acknowledge that there are rules and at what point the good guys have to ignore laws themselves to reign in the evil doers, but it doesn’t overwhelm the movie and never seems preachy.  And while it’s certainly a modern question on many people’s minds, it never seems like it’s just replaying headlines from CNN.  It makes it part of Gotham and part of who Batman is becoming.

And Gary Oldman? Well, he’s the motherfucking Gary Oldman. He was brilliant in Batman Begins, but he’s even more so in The Dark Knight. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

So does Heath Ledger deserve an Oscar?  Yes, absolutely.  It will be hard to imagine any future Batman movies without him, but we’ll have to at some point, because if the Joker dies, Batman dies.  Or if Joel Schumacher does another Batman movie ever again, Batman dies, but that’s a whole different ball of wax.  And it’s a rare movie that lives up to the hype and boy was there a lot of hype.

And for that, it deserves a serious look for Best Picture. What Nolan has done is taken our notion of the hero and turned it on its head without being campy or coy. In the end, the bad guys win because the hero has become so enamored with creation an illusion of justice rather than real justice. Nolan has taken a hero so established as Batman and created a political-social statement of mythological proportions that goes down with such Hollywood blockbuster sugar that you don’t even know it’s there until it’s already in your bloodstream.

In all the muck of who-is-really-the-hero, who-is-really-the-villain, why-won’t-Bale-stop-with-the-super-husky-Batman-voice-already stuff, one could argue that the movie does in some ways drag on a bit and that’s what kills it from being way better than it really could have. The franchise-ness of it all demands that they roll to the red light from 200 yards away rather than be so ballsy as to slam on the brakes so they can shoot away in the next movie and that’s too bad. But I can forgive that one minor flaw, especially if Chris Nolan is going where I hope he’s going with the story line.

But if Batman Begins was a story about one of the big things that makes Batman so appealing, the idea that every little boy has somewhere in their head that if someone killed their entire family and they were pissed off enough, they could train to be the baddest motherfucker on the planet, The Dark Knight plays on the idea that being the baddest motherfucker on the planet may not be all it’s cracked up to be and maybe beating someone to a pulp just because you can isn’t the best course of action.

The 10 million dollar question now is… who’s next? Are they immediately going to continue the Joker story with someone else? Most likely not. All signs seem to point to the Riddler being in the next one as long as he’s not just a cheap Joker rip-off as he can often be portrayed. And too bad they killed off Two Face so soon. Bane doesn’t have any depth, but is good for a punch in the face. The Penguin, eh maybe… Catwoman if they need a more interesting love interest. Ventriloquist and Clayface are also good choices. Just please leave Robin out.

IHC Rating: 9 out of 10

Bonus: Batman wigging out

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