Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Eric Roberts, Anthony Michael Hall.
Rating: (M)
3 stars (out of 5)
This year there has been an interesting battle of the genders at the movie box office.
The girls have been winning hands down with Sex and the City as the year's smash but now the guys have surged back and The Dark Knight (Rialto and Hoyts) is breaking every attendance record you care to name.
No doubt this latest Batman will do good business here as people check out Heath Ledger's take on The Joker.
It has been 19 years since Jack Nicholson gave what seemed then the definitive performance as Batman's greatest foe and a lot of water has passed under the bridge.
Yet watching the unremitting grimness of the retooled Gotham story I found myself wondering have things really become that much nastier? The Joker's key line is "why so serious?" and that is the question he might well have been asking of the film.
When Tim Burton started this whole Batman-on-film thing he gave us a grim crime-ridden city that needed a masked avenger dressed as a bat, but he also knew that he was filming a cartoon.
Now that Batman is a "Dark Knight'' he spends half his time debating the ethics of his actions.
I found this hard to take.
Once you have made the mental leap to put on the bat suit your philosophical stance is beside the point.
Ledger's Joker is by far the best thing in the movie but all this Oscar talk is pure sentiment.
Not that you should rule it out as the academy is prone to sentimentality.
The Dark Knight is unrelenting and ultimately tedious but the fan boys for whom it is made are going to love it.
Just do not take very young children as The Joker is truly the stuff of nightmares.
