Movie: Dark Knight

It was always going to be tough for this film to live up to the hype.

Much has been said and written about it and many claims made. I tried to ignore everything I’d heard and just watch the movie – the results were surprising and a little confusing.

Firstly, there are some excellent performances. Of course, Heath Ledger as the Joker is just wonderful - very quirky and jumpy and always feels very dangerous. Christian Bale is good, especially as Wayne where his understatedness combines wonderfully with his flamboyance - a real feeling of a man playing the part rather than being it. His Batman is not quite as convincing for me, but is certainly gritty and oh so dark. Gary Oldman did a wonderful job with Gordon – again, underplayed the part but with an underlying strength. Morgan Freeman wasn’t given much to work with, but is a safe pair of hands in any movie.

Then we come to Aaron Eckhart. I very much enjoyed his characterisation of Two-Face – and loved the visuals – but never could quite warm to him as Dent. Perhaps this is where the film fell down for me. He looked the part, did the right things, but I could never connect with the character and I think I needed to in order to be taken on the journey that the screenplay intended. I feel perhaps there was too much Two-Face in him from the start. In a movie with so many carefully considered and subtle performances (much to it’s credit), his was too obvious and clumsy. Not that it’s easy to play the good guy when there are so many wonderful characters with dark sides to them.

The feel and visualisation of the film was excellent. Very dark and brooding, lots of interplay between the dark and good sides of the characters. There was a pithy sense of reality throughout – in that dead people actually mattered and doing the right thing wasn’t straightforward or easy.

All in all I loved lots of this film, I loved many of the performances and I enjoyed both the action and developmental scenes. I appreciated the understated performances, the thoughtful and three-dimensional character development and the edgy, dark tones. But in the end, this isn’t enough to make a great film. The whole thing just didn’t hang together as it should, didn’t carry me along with it. I always felt I was watching a series of half-hour adventures, one after the other, instead of a single, fully realised work. I hate having to say this because I feel this film is a real return to form for the franchise (after a number of poor, shallow offerings) and I really wanted to love it, but there we are.

You can go and watch it, you can enjoy it and get a lot out of it, but it just doesn’t have that magic factor of really personally meaning something.

7/10