Buy Or Don’t Buy

Because when you’re a website whose goal is to reduce everything to a simple binary opposition, there’s really only one way to write a movie review: bullet points! I’m putting in a jump, because there will be spoilers. Quick, to the rest of the post!

• Buy: No Origin Story - One of the things that always annoys me a little bit about comic-book movies is the necessity of including an hour-long explanation of how our hero came to acquire his powers/motivation/batsuit. (I was excited when “Hancock” skipped this part, until they decided to cram in all the exposition at the end, Shyamalan-style.) It’s not just a problem in the first film in a series; in “Spiderman 3″ Peter Parker’s motivation still was avenging Uncle Ben’s death. “The Dark Knight” dispenses with all that. For one, Bruce Wayne’s not still moping around over his parents’ deaths, not that he’s got a whole city to protect now. Even better though, is the decision not to give The Joker some silly pop-psychobabble backstory. Why does a grown man dress up like a clown and commit crimes? Because he’s crazy. Duh.

• Buy: An Ensemble- Most comic-book movies by necessity focus on one individual superhero. (Even the X-Men films could basically be called “Wolverine”.) What makes “The Dark Knight” interesting is that our hero this time is basically a nonentity. Besides flying around and punching people, Batman doesn’t really do much in the film; he’s the guy on the sidelines in an epic duel between the forces of law and order (Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon and Aaron Eckhart’s DA Harvey Dent) and anarchy (Heath Ledger’s Joker). As Dent, Eckhart spends the first two-thirds of the film as a cross between Barack Obama and Rudy Giuliani. With his deep tan and flashy grin Eckhart can do insincerity with the best of them, so it’s a surprise to see that he can play a character who represents decency and idealism and still come off as a normal human being. Enough has been written about Ledger’s performance - and it is great - but one thing that’s worth noting is how funny he’s made the character. He’s not funny a 90-series ’spouting one-liners after doing something violent’ villain, but in a bizarre, hammy way that brings to mind a horrible stand-up comic. Watch his little walk out of Gotham General: it’s genius.

• Buy: Darkness - “The Dark Knight” is like “The Wire” in that it makes your realize how often other films of the genre pull their punches. Superheroes always get put in positions where they have to make hard choices about who to save, and time and time again the filmmakers let them off the hook. There’s a sequence in the middle of the film where Batman has to choose which of his friends to save from one of the Joker’s deathtraps. It’s a sequence we’ve seen before. In “Spiderman”, Toby Maguire had to choose between saving Kirsten Dunst or a tramload of tourists, in “Batman Forever” Val Kilmer had to choose between saving Chris O’Donnell or Nicole Kidman. It never quite works as a climax, because you know our hero is going to do some sort of magic trick and manage to save everybody. That magic trick does not happen in “The Dark Knight.”

• Buy: Motherfucking Two-Face - I was never that interested in Two-Face in the universe of Batman villains until I read “Batman: Year One,” where Harvey Dent is a fully-sketched-out character, one of Batman’s allies. (Note to people who know things about comics: is this the first time Dent was shown as Batman’s friend, or was that always part of the character.) A tragic figure with themes of downfall and betrayal just seems so much more interesting to me than a crazy guy with an obsession with the number 2. The better person Harvey Dent is, the better villain Two-Face is; and Eckhart’s Dent is very good. Credit to the special effects people too, this Two-Face is also scary as hell. For once, he looks like a someone who’s actually scarred instead of a man with an invisible line drawn down his body. Of course, it’s not very hard to top this:

• Buy: Gotham City - I liked “Batman Begins” a lot, but it had the same problem as the other Batman movies in that Gotham City never seemed like a real place. This time, though, there are some minor changes that make it a better setting. One, Nolan’s tuned the outlandishness way down, with no crazy ‘Metropolis’ touches anymore. Two, (and I don’t know if this is true) it seems like there’s a lot less sets and way more location shooting. Finally and most importantly , he’s opened up the city in terms of characters. Gotham has a newscaster, a mayor, a police commissioner, a couple of hospitals, hell there’s even a climactic sequence involving commuters. Who would ever think a comic-book movie would care about what happened to “the bridge and tunnel crowd”?

• Buy: Cameos - William Fichtner kicking ass with a shotgun! Anthony Michael Hall doing his best Keith Olbermann impression! Senator Patrick Leahy telling off the Joker!

• Buy: Bruce Wayne’s ‘Bruce Wayne’ impression - Christian Bale does a very good job playing someone who is playing at being an asshole.

• Don’t Buy: The Moral - This isn’t a ‘Don’t Buy” so much as it is a ‘I’m confused and thus do not know whether or not to Buy’. The first two hours of the movie are unrelentingly grim. The love interest gets killed. A boatload of yuppies have to go through a dynamite-infused version of The Prisoner’s Dilemma. A 9-year-old moppet gets a gun held to his head. Our heroes repeatedly make bad decisions that end in innocent people getting killed. By the end, Batman is pushing cops out of windows. And then suddenly, when it comes time for the end, suddenly it’s speech-time and we learn “All people are good and orderly: The Batman was right!” And then the movie goes and undercuts that message buy repeating an earlier canard: “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” So which is it? [Update: Thinking over it, I think the message was "People kind of suck, but they deserve to be protected anyway, even though due to their suckiness, they will not appreciate being protected" but that doesn't fit into a neat phrase.]

• Don’t Buy: Exposition - There’s a lot of scene-setting to get through in the first half-hour of the film, and it makes some of the dialogue scenes incredibly clunky. People are always clumsily introducing themselves and pointing out their relationships to the other characters and just generally over-spelling things out. Tell less, next time, Chris.

• Don’t Buy: Lame Sonar Subplot - Batman needs to find the Joker before any more innocent people die, and so what does he do? Oh, he just hacks into the Gotham cell network so that if the Joker speaks near one of them, Batman will be able to triangulate his position. It feels incredibly ludicrous and shoe-horned in, just so Morgan Freeman can look solemn and intone in his Wise Morgan Freeman Voice that this time Batman has gone too far.

• Don’t Buy: Nestor Carbonell’s eyeliner - Come on, man. You’re supposed to be playing the corrupt mayor of a major American city, not an Egyptian sun-god.

• Don’t Buy: How Long This Entry Is - Seriously. This was supposed to be a QuickHits Edition.