Batman: The Dark Knight (2008)

In my humble opinion (and I’m no comic-book scholar), the Joker might be the single greatest villain in the paneled world. I love Jack Nicholson’s take on the character, but sorry, it’s not the least bit frightening. Sure, he puts strychnine into make-up, shampoo, and cologne, and drops lethal nerve gas onto Gotham city, but the man himself? He’s little more than an overweight Pan-Caked doofus. He’s entertaining to watch, but the character was served very poorly. The Joker must create the same feeling that, say, Anthony Hopkins did, in The Silence of the Lambs: he’s all feral, ungovernable teeth and nails, and the pane of glass blocking him off from your fingers and toes is the most precious thing in the world to you when you’re standing before him. I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I saw the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s sequel to his sober reimagining of the Batman frachise, Batman Begins (2005), “The only thing we found in his pockets were knives and lint.” Yes!! The Joker, himself, is a flailing knife, and a prodigiously sharpened one, waving back and forth in the air, aiming for no one in particular, but saving no one a slice through the jugular.

Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) didn’t take the comic book character seriously (whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing I don’t know) and his two films were silly, tongue-in-cheek affairs much closer to resembling the campy 1966 television series starring Adam West

...than to the hard-edged comics by Frank Miller (1986) (left) or Alan Moore (1988) (right).



Personally I found the Adam West television show to be insufferable. I think Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) is irredeemably silly and his Batman (1989) is tolerable because I enjoy watching Nicholson, even though he’s only scary very briefly and the rest of the time prances like a peacock and looks like one of those clowns who show up to children’s birthday parties to fashion balloon animals.

As for Christopher Nolan’s offering of the character, much has been said about Heath Ledger’s Joker, but not all the credit must go to him: 35% of the success must go to the make-up and wardrobe department, for avoiding Nicholson’s flamboyant, camp getup and going with dark purple murderer chic.

The other masterstroke is smudging Ledger’s face paint so that it streaks, splotches, and runs, a deliberate mess which brilliantly radiates the warped sloppy dissonance reverberating in the Joker’s brain cavity.

And of course, there is Ledger himself, who displays a gift for a giggling array of facial tics and ghoulish idiosyncrasies that turn him into a walking magnet. When Ledger enters a room, the air bristles as if receiving an animal that escaped from the zoo; he skips around hostages like a demented jackal, as wild and capricious as a starving wolf. It’s the Joker as plausible mass murderer, which makes him arrestingly, urgently scary.

Even the harshest critics of this film will be hard-pressed to find a boring breath or gesture from Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker, a portrayal that makes Jack Nicholson’s look as silly and unthreatening as a Cirque du Soleil mime on a bender.

However, like Batman Begins, the story is often tediously by the numbers, and Nolan persists in his underwhelming artistry, being merely functional as a director rather than the virtuoso showstopper that jubilant fans seem to be confusing with the performance of an actor that deserved a much greater film to surround it. The film is 2 hours and 35 minutes, and it feels like it. It took about an hour and a half for me to actually start to care. Part of this comes from the fact that the Joker only makes two or three all too brief appearances during the First Act, one of which has him threatening a powerful gangster with a forcible widening of the mouth via knife blade. The Joker tells a macabre little story to the man about his abusive upbringing all the while holding the knife to the corner of the man’s mouth. The anticipation builds for a bizarre face mutilation, a demonstration of the mysterious Joker’s sadistic glee, and, and, there’s a loud noise of some sort, and the man falls dead. What? Did he stab him? Did he slice his throat? Did one of the Joker’s thugs shoot the man dead? Nolan fumbles this moment so badly that it practically invalidates the entire scene. There are many inept choices made by the director throughout the film. He shoots one or two action scenes rather competently, but others are just close-ups of blurs. You’d think by now Nolan would have learned to be liberal with the establishing shots and concerned with delivering coherent fight sequences. He has improved since Batman Begins, though, as seen during a spectacular long-distance shot of an 18-wheeler exploding from the base and catapulting vertically through the air. The action scenes are moderately thrilling when they are done well, two especially. The first is an awesome chase of a police van through a tunnel by a truck housing the Joker’s henchmen. The awesomeness comes in when the speeding truck pulls up alongside the van, and a side compartment of the truck opens to reveal the Joker himself, who proceeds to fire at the van with a fully automatic machine pistol, a shotgun, and finally, a bazooka.

He does most of this while giggling.

The second occurs just after the 18-wheeler has landed upside down at the end of a Gotham City street which has been turned into an impromptu war zone by the Joker. He pulls himself out of the 18-wheeler, and walks into cars driving in his direction, firing a submachine gun at them to clear his path. At the opposite end of the street is Batman on his Batpod. The urban mayhem and the street duel are shot very well so as to accentuate the city buildings towering around the Joker and Batman, as if to underline the power these two men have over the city, reminding us that the one who wins the city is the one who doesn’t back down.


A game of chicken commences as Batman speeds his Batpod towards the Joker, who refuses to move, inviting the collision. Of course Batman must swerve out of the way of the madman, and the motorcycle skids and crashes. This is basically the showdown to end all showdowns. As Joker says later, “This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.”

The reason the film appears to reach such newfound heights is the way the Joker character has unleashed everyone’s inhibitions about what’s safe or not. Hearing negative reviews criticizing the film for being, among other things, “sadistic,” was reassuring. I wanted my Joker served up hideous, uncompromising, as twisted as possible.

Unfortunately, hyperbolic reports of uber-darkness inflated my conception of what was to come. The murder and mayhem Nolan serves up is considerably less transgressive than what I wanted: Joker blows some shit up, cold-bloodedly guns down some henchmen, threatens people with malevolent behavior, nothing unusually envelope-pushing. A major character is killed in an explosion, but my reaction was more akin to, “Didn’t expect that person to die. Huh.” than, “Truly Gotham city, nay, the world seems to now be shrouded in pitiless tragedy! This is R-rated levels of cynicism and brutality!” These cries of sadism are coming from some really soft film reviewers. The most freakish, subversive thing is an instance where Nolan has the Joker dress up in a nurse’s outfit.

The only thing the film does that could be considered really upsetting to anyone older than maybe 12 is to show the Joker videotaping himself with a duct-taped hostage and then cackling madly while we hear cries of distress or pain from the hostage and then the video feed cuts to static.

About the scene with the nurse’s outfit, Nolan did impress with his managing a wide shot of the Joker (in nurse’s outfit) ambling out of a hospital (evacuated to preserve the children’s tears) as it erupts into fireballs behind him. Within the same single take, the Joker turns to his handiwork and I held my breath that Ledger wouldn’t fuck anything up for fear that all those very expensive detonations and freshly exploded building would have been wasted, or that Nolan would have to abandon his desired edit-free shot. Thankfully, Ledger is a consummate pro and the already impressive sequence is made even more impressive by virtue of its being a virtuoso long take.

I’ll probably see it again simply to revel in Ledger’s maniacal performance, a performance which is too entertaining and too iconic to merit anything less than a posthumous Academy Award.



Grade: B+