My review of "The Dark Knight"

Lots of potential dragged down by a scatterbrained, proposterous script and bland directing. Let's start with the good before I give my take on where it all went wrong.

The visuals are gritty and massive. The cinematography, sound, art direction, and costumes are all superb. Heath Ledger jumps off the screen with his big, dynamic performance. He's thrilling to watch in every scene.

And...the bad. (Spoiler Alert) It's too long. The script is frantic and full of holes, glossing over important plot points and skipping character development and backstory. Things happen quickly and are never really explained. The narrative is schitzofrenic...one plot begins with the mob, money laundering, and The Joker offering to to kill Batman. That plot is never really resolved when in the third act Ledger's character miraculously turns the perfect, heart-of-gold District Attorney into a villain simply by bumping off his girlfriend. I think Christopher Nolan was really aiming high with several "Sophie's Choice" type *who dies?* decisions (the DA's girlfriend and the two boats) but apparantly he hasn't seen the eight or so "Saw" movies that have absolutely drained every ounce of cleverness out of those gimmicks. As a viewer I felt I was constantly waiting for a coherant narrative to emerge...waiting for it to all go somewhere but it never did and there was never any good conflict or resolution...just a lot of cliche moral dilemmas and bad script choices.

Christian Bale's Batman voice was ridiculous. Gary Oldman died and then wasn't dead with no real explaination. The cell phone radar was the stupidest tech idea ever. The Two-Face add-on plot should have been saved for another movie and was precisely where the movie jumped the shark for me.

The worst tragedy of all is the stellar cast gone to waste. Gary Oldman. Morgan Freeman. Aaron Eckhart. Maggie Gyllenhaal. Michael Caine. Christian Bale. All incredible actors who could carry a film on their own. All boring.

Chrisopher Nolan is a brilliant director and a intriguing screenwriter. How he managed to turn out this nonsensical crap, full of bad dialogue and underdeveloped plot, is a mystery to me.

It was worth watching for Heath's performance but it was the only thing worth watching and they failed to build a decent movie around it. Period.