In Queensland cinemas Wednesday July 16 [M]

Director: Christopher Nolan

Runtime: 152mins

There’s been a run of decent-to-good superhero movies lately and part of the credit for that belongs to Christopher Nolan for raising the standards with Batman Begins. One thing those subsequent movies have had difficulty with, however, is their villains. Casting someone capable of giving an audience the chills is great up until the moment when the costumes and the special effects come out, turning that menacing villain into the less interesting half of a fight scene.

The Dark Knight avoids that problem by never letting Heath Ledger out of his costume, never letting his Joker be an ordinary, human, bad guy. The first time we see him he’s pulling off a clown mask to reveal clown makeup underneath. Ledger’s wild Joker isn’t a bad guy with a dramatic origin and a troubled backstory, but an unpredictable and inexplicable force of nature. He’s manic, rabid, scary and a little camp, licking his scarred lips while ranting and muttering hysterically. Every scene he’s in he owns and everybody else has to race just to keep up.

Michael Caine and Gary Oldman continue to impress as sarcastic butler Alfred and good cop Jim Gordon respectively, while Maggie Gyllenhaal makes love interest Rachel Dawes more compellingly conflicted than Katie Holmes managed to in the previous movie. Christian Bale is given a new Batsuit designed to be more mobile and his husky-voiced Batman seems less stiff as a result. He’s given a new gadget to play with as well, a motorbike that, though obviously a toyseller’s dream, is a little too far over the top, more like something from the Joel Schumacher Batman movies.

The Joker on the other hand has no gadgets other than knives and bombs with which to destroy half of Gotham city, which looks less like the dark, cramped urban planner’s nightmare of Batman Begins and more like an ordinary city. While the heroes try to create an inspiring symbol for people to believe in by using new district attorney Harvey Dent, portrayed as a driven white knight by Aaron Eckhart, the Joker already is a symbol. He’s pure chaos, unfair and random, proof that the justice the heroes are obsessed with doesn’t exist. While Nolan has directed another thrilling, action-packed superhero movie in The Dark Knight, he also has a point to make – there may not be any real justice in the world, but we should believe in the ideal anyway.

****

JODY MACGREGOR

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