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Jeremy Is the Only Person in America Who Didn’t Like The Dark Knight

Aug 16

JeremyMovies Batman, Heath Ledger, Joker, The Dark Knight 2 Comments

WARNING: Spoilers ahead (if there is anyone not me who hasn’t seen the movie)

I bet you’re thinking that this topic is so over and why would I even write about it weeks after its release, when its relevance has completely dried up. Well, I just finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight and I thought it frankly sucked sweaty donkey balls. It was so bad that I felt I need to come back home and react to everyone else’s raves with a rant of my own. I should have had a premonition of the disappointment I was in for when the lights went down and the trailers came on; sadly, I didn’t. I saw through an interminable set of images that did not capture my attention or make me want to keep my eyes or ears on the screen. Little did I know that this was just a teaser of my feelings for the rest of the afternoon!

First off, let’s deal with Heath Ledger, since that’s the biggest talk surround the movie. Ledger certainly pulled off this final role much better than I ever would have given him credit for prior to seeing the film. I will say that he was a brighter spot in a dull, dreary afternoon for me. His Joker stands out as excellent, with a level of panache and eerie madness rarely seen in a screen actor; frankly had I not known it was Heath Ledger, the credits would have surprised me. His performance, however, did not reach the brilliance one associates with Oscar-worthy roles, despite all the buzz. The Joker’s failing to me was an inability to really engage with the other characters.

Many of the other actors in the film are among my favorites, including Ledger himself. I love watching Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and even Christian Bale (though I can only really see him singing and dancing to “Santa Fe” the whole time). I usually even don’t mind watching them in bad roles. They did not, however, excite me here, as none of them were able to show off the range of what they can do on the screen. All characters were one dimensional sketches rather than the complex constructions that make us care about them. Maggie Gyllenhaal was just as big a waste of screen time as Katie Holmes was in Batman Begins, supporting the contention I had back then that it was the role and writing rather than the actress that made Rachel Dawes wooden and zero dimensional.

The story itself was completely uninspiring and much more slow-moving than a comic book action movie should ever be. (Though that kind of worked for Superman Returns.) For two and a half hours, I was bludgeoned with the idea that Batman is an anti-hero, dammit, he is, he is! However, the juxtaposition of the Joker’s delightlfully psychotic anarchy next to Batman’s careful disregard of the law was so poorly drawn as to be nearly lost entirely. The set ups in the plot were entirely transparent (puh-lease, I knew there was a bomb in his stomach the second he said he was nauseous! not to mention the criminal on the boat with the detonator…OBVIOUS! Gordon’s “death?” if you could only see my eyes rolling…) and added no sense of inventiveness to the story. The density of the Harvey Dent plot line only served to distract from the Joker’s story, even though it was supposed to have been engineered by him.

Not even the cool shit — the explosions, the gizmos — could save this film for me. In the end, it had nothing I enjoyed. About 20 minutes into the movie, I started to think “It’s a shame I don’t have to pee. Then I could at least get up for a few minutes.” I don’t know what others saw in The Dark Knight; whatever it was, I’m in the dark about it.