Dynamic duel

Great performances and masterful direction
make The Dark Knight a near-perfect
summer blockbuster

by MALCOLM FRASER

The superhero film, which seemed to have had such a promising revival, has recently found itself in a stagnant state. It’s therefore a relief to report that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is an unqualified success, going above and beyond the genre’s parameters and achieving that elusive goal of thoroughly pleasing the popcorn crowd while maintaining the dark undercurrent that’s traditionally given the Batman franchise its edge.

Back from Batman Begins are Christian Bale as the tormented billionaire/vigilante Bruce Wayne, Michael Caine as his wise butler Alfred, Morgan Freeman as his go-to techno-wiz Lucius Fox and Gary Oldman as Gotham City police lieutenant Gordon. With Katie Holmes busy breeding eighth-level Thetans, Maggie Gyllenhaal fills her shoes as lawyer/love interest Rachel Dawes.

On board to give Batman grief are an organized crime cabal, Gotham DA and romantic rival Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and as everyone knows, a certain clown-faced supervillain played by the late Heath Ledger.

The action begins immediately, with a Joker-organized bank heist, and just as quickly Nolan starts to masterfully weave a complicated web of subplots and character development. The introduction of Ledger’s Joker is a slow tease, initially just a series of fleeting appearances as Bale travels to Hong Kong with a wackload of gizmos to capture a Hong Kong embezzler.

When the Joker emerges to sow terror around town, Ledger more than lives up to all the hype. It’s difficult to evaluate the performance separately from the tragedy of his untimely death and the rumours about his spiralling lifestyle during the shoot, but every moment he’s onscreen is creepy, intense and totally commanding. Whoever came up with his make-up design also deserves kudos; Ledger looks like he sloppily applied it a few days ago and hasn’t washed since, which only adds to the unsettling vibe.

Eckhart, always a reliably solid character actor, also gives it his all as the ambitious crusader Dent (comic book nerds will know what eventually becomes of him, but I won’t spoil the surprise for the rest of us as it happens late in the film). The cast as a whole is superb, so much so that Bale, known for pushing himself to physical extremes in films like The Machinist, American Psycho and Rescue Dawn, seems to hold back, giving a relatively neutral and reserved performance.

With such a complicated and ambitious storyline, many lesser filmmakers would drop the ball. Admittedly, an attempt at drawing a quasi-political analogy, with Batman as a Bush-like morally compromised crusader and the Joker as a Bin Laden-esque agent of amoral chaos, is a bit half-baked. And some of the action scenes are cut so fast they’re barely coherent—but at this point in cinematic history, complaining about that seems to be the provenance of grumpy old men.

In pulling off the feat of mixing comic book excitement with genuinely gripping characters, Nolan has done more than just create a near-perfect summer blockbuster; he’s made Tim Burton’s gothic Batman look like the corny Adam West series of old.

The Dark Knight Opens
this Friday, July 18

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