No Country for Bat Men

I'll cut to the chase right away. At two and a half hours, The Dark Knight , director Christoper Nolan's follow up to his well-received Batman Begins, is too long.

Having said that, I'm not sure what scenes I would cut. Like the epidural tapestry on the tattooed main character in another Nolan film, Memento, each piece is an intrical part of the whole. Take one out, and I'm not sure that the story holds up.

Perhaps the problem is that each separate scene runs a bit too long. Shortening up a few of the action sequences and making the soliloquies less repetitive would have taken out a lot of the narrative slack and made TDK a tighter film.

Some have argued that the movie should have ended sooner. Presumably while DA Harvey Dent, half his face burnt off, was still in the hospital. Thus, paving the way for the third installment.

I disagree. For all the talk about Heath Ledger's Joker, and he is VERY good, the story is REALLY about Dent's transformation into "Two-Face."

Some have criticized the Joker for basically carrying the same personna throughout the film.

But the Joker is not supposed to "grow" as the movie progresses. He just is. He's the sum of everyone's fears and meant to explain how a good person like Harvey Dent, can become the very thing he's trying to fight.

Nolan is clearly making a statement about the difficult choices our culture's current post 9/11 paranoia has forced us to make. And to fight Gotham City's terrorists, Batman is unapologetic in his willingness to take the low road. This includes beating suspects and engaging in telephone surveillance that would make your average card-carrying ACLU member's head explode.

In a scene very reminiscent of the first Superman, Batman is faced with a Hobson's choice as his love interest, Rachel Dawes, and Dent are held in separate locations both rigged with explosives timed to go off simultaneously. To further connect TDK to the real "war" on global terrorism, Nolan has them not so subtly strapped to oil barrels. The payoff to this situation in TDK is much more effective than Superman's. Batman can't turn back time after all.

While it would be easy to, TDK doesn't really take a hard position on whether the ends justify the means. On the one hand, Nolan does try to establish boundaries that a "moral" society shouldn't cross (I'm thinking about the dilemma involving the two ferries at the end). However, he also presents a worldview which seems to be say that just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're NOT out to get you.

As I said, Ledger is VERY good as the Joker. Better than Jack Nicholson's incarnation. Both actors harvested laughs in the role. But with Ledger, the laughter is tinged with a lot of dread.

The problem, like most things in TDK, is that the Joker's expositions on the nature of good and evil, much like the explanations of how he got his facial scars, go on too long and cover the same ground over and over again.

Likewise, Dent's exploits get repetitive. He's always flipping a coin before deciding to kill someone. I get it, we live in a cruel universe where life can be random.

I had forgotten this, but it appears that Two-Face's constant coin-flipping as a device to determine the fate of his victims prefigured novelist Cormac McCarthy's Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. In a bit of esoteric movie irony, Tommy Lee Jones, who played the first cinematic Two-Face in 1995's Batman Forever, also played Sheriff Bell to Javier Bardem's coin-flipping Chigurh in the movie version of No Country for Old Men.

Speaking of which, in the end, it was a coin toss for me if TDK worked.

On the one hand, were the faults I listed above. However, it does have quite a bit going for it.

All of the actors were on their game. The action scenes, which some have characterized as hard to follow, were well done and much more effective than the clean, overly choreographed Bourne series fights. And Nolan has taken the fantasy out of Burton's Batman and transported him into a much more realistic and relevant setting.

Make no mistake about it. If the Joker were to screen TDK from his padded cell, he himself might have proclaimed "why so serious?"

But, I like serious.